Working alongside architects, without owning the room

An increasing proportion of the enquiries that reach us come from architects and interior designers rather than from the client directly. That is the part of the practice we have thought about hardest, because it is the part where getting the etiquette wrong does the most damage.

The premise

A studio working at the top of the residential market is now routinely asked to deliver a private cinema. It is a reasonable thing for a client to expect and an unreasonable thing to specialise in: the discipline sits somewhere between building physics, electro-acoustics and interior detailing, and it changes often enough to need continuous attention.

So the choice is usually between learning it, guessing at it, or bringing in someone who already has it. We would like to be the third option, and we would like to be it in a way that costs the lead studio nothing in authorship.

How it is structured

Four things, and they are all negotiable in one direction only — yours.

Discreet by default. We work under your studio's lead. Behind the scenes, co-credited, or named — your call, made once, at the start, and not revisited.

Design-first. We are not there to explain why your ceiling detail is inconvenient. We are there to find the version of it that also works acoustically. Where that is genuinely impossible we say so early, with the reason and the alternatives, not late and as a constraint.

One named partner. Not a team inbox and not a rotating account manager. One person across every project, who remembers the last one.

Clear referral terms. Written down, transparent in both directions, and agreed before there is anything to be awkward about.

When to bring us in

Earlier than feels necessary. The decisions with the largest consequences — ceiling build-up, room proportion, isolation strategy, where the plant goes — are all made in the first weeks and are all nearly free to get right then.

By first fix, most of them have already been made.