The Client Is Part of the Design

Beginning with listening

Every project begins the same way — with a conversation that has nothing to do with architecture. We ask clients how they live, how they work, what they find difficult about the spaces they currently occupy. We ask about the things they have not been able to articulate to previous architects, the preferences they consider too specific or too personal to mention. We ask what they want to feel when they walk into the finished building, not what they want it to look like.

This process takes longer than a conventional brief. It produces something more useful than a schedule of accommodation and a list of spatial requirements. It produces an understanding of the people the building is being made for — their rhythms, their values, their tolerance for the unexpected. That understanding shapes every decision that follows.

When clients push back

The most productive client relationships we have had have not been the smoothest ones. The clients who challenged our proposals, who returned to first principles when they were uncertain, who refused to approve something they did not fully understand — these are the clients whose projects pushed us furthest.

Pushback, when it comes from genuine engagement rather than anxiety, is a form of collaboration. It forces us to examine our own assumptions, to test whether a design decision is as resolved as we believed it to be, to find solutions that work harder than the ones we arrived at first. Some of our most considered details exist because a client asked a question we initially found uncomfortable.

Trust and its limits

There is a version of the client relationship in which the architect is given complete creative freedom and the client steps back entirely. We do not seek this arrangement and we do not think it produces the best buildings. A client who is fully invested in the process brings knowledge that no architect can possess — knowledge of how they will actually use the spaces being designed, what their daily life requires, what matters to them in ways that may not be legible from the outside.

The architect's expertise is in translating those requirements into spatial, material, and structural decisions. The client's expertise is in knowing what their life actually demands. Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient on its own.

What collaboration produces

The Mele House, completed in 2023, is the clearest example in our recent work of what genuine collaboration produces. The clients were deeply involved throughout — attending every design review, asking detailed questions about every material decision, proposing modifications that we initially resisted and later recognised as improvements.

The building that resulted is one we could not have designed without them. It carries their specific knowledge of how they wanted to inhabit it — the position of a particular window that catches the morning light they wanted to wake to, the workshop space that was added late in the process and became the heart of the ground floor. It is also, without question, one of the strongest projects we have produced. The two things are not unrelated.