Studio

WHAT WE DO

Landscape architecture: public parks and spaces, private compounds and gardens, estate layouts, and sites where drainage is the design problem.

Architecture: new-build and adaptation, usually at the scale of a house or a small block, and occasionally a good deal larger.

Interior design: the rooms inside the buildings we draw, and sometimes rooms inside buildings we did not.

Those are three professions and one practice. Rather than write about integration, here is the record.

Two of the seven used all three disciplines and five used more than one. Five are in Ghana and two in Germany.

Work usually arrives as one discipline and grows. Project Maxpro came to us as a garden and ended as the garden, the interiors and a modified building. We would rather hold all of it than hand half away, because the joins are where projects normally fail.

WHAT YOU GET

A commission runs in five stages. Each one ends in drawings.

Site analysis

What the ground has already decided: levels and falls, boundaries, what is standing on it, where the water goes.

Concept

The scheme in outline and the reasoning for it — enough to settle the shape of the thing before anyone draws it properly.

Developed design

The scheme resolved, with the 3D work that goes with it. This is where you see what you are buying, while it is still cheap to change.

Permit set

The package drawn to what the assembly asks for, at the scales it asks for. Lodging it is yours to do. If you would rather we did, that is agreed when we get there.

Construction drawings

What the builder works from: dimensions, levels, materials and falls, named rather than implied.

Renders are not a stage of their own. They belong to developed design, because that is the point at which a drawing has to convince somebody who does not read drawings.

How long depends on the size of the job, and it is the drawings being timed, not the building. A single plot, taken from site analysis through to construction drawings, runs to about two or three weeks. Anything beyond these five, and there usually is something, is agreed at contract rather than assumed.