SeriArch Studio

Designing your own workplace removes every excuse. There is no client to negotiate with and no brief to hide behind, which makes it the most honest test of whether the studio actually believes what it tells people.

The site is 190 square metres on a street of low-set brick warehouses. Rather than fill it, we pushed the building to the southern boundary and gave the remaining third to a courtyard, so the workroom borrows light from the north without taking the afternoon sun.

Inside is a single room. Eleven desks, one long table, and a wall of flat files — no partitions, no meeting rooms with doors. Conversations are overheard on purpose; it is how the younger architects learn what a hard phone call with a certifier sounds like.

The material list is short enough to write on one page: blockwork, hoop pine, galvanised steel, one slab of granite at the kitchen. Everything is left as it arrived on site, which is cheaper, ages better, and means nothing needs repainting in five years.