Why we keep the interiors in-house

Clients ask this in the first meeting, usually politely, and what they mean is whether a practice this size is spreading itself thin. It is a fair question, and the answer is not that the disciplines enrich one another.

The failures we see are not in the middle of anybody’s package. They are at the boundary: the threshold where paving meets floor finish, the socket set against a skirting that changed later, the level that works on the landscape drawing and is twelve millimetres out once the tile adhesive is on the interior one. Nobody’s drawing is wrong. The chain between them was never checked by one person.

Of the seven projects on this site, five ran more than one discipline and two ran all three. Holding both packages means one datum and one person answerable for the threshold.

WHAT IT COSTS

It produces its own category of failure and we would rather name it than not. When one office holds everything, a bad assumption made in week two travels through the landscape, the building and the interiors without meeting anybody whose job it is to question it. Three consultants give a client three opinions, and there is real value in that which we are not going to talk our way around.

Our check is that the interior take-off is done by whoever did not draw the building. That is weaker than a separate practice and we know it. It works while the studio is small enough that the second person genuinely has standing to say the wall is wrong, and it stops working at the size where they report to the person who drew it.