Your whole house considered as one project.

I work with homeowners who are making significant changes to an existing property and want someone to look at the building as a whole.

That means understanding how the house works now, where it is frustrating you, what is worth keeping and which changes will make the greatest difference. Sometimes that means extending. Sometimes it means re-planning the space you already have. Often it means looking at architecture and interiors together rather than treating them as separate stages.

The aim is not to make the house bigger for the sake of it. It is to make better decisions about the building you already own.

Start with the problem, not the solution

A client may come to me convinced they need an extension.

Sometimes they do.

But before drawing one, I want to understand why the house is not working.

Is the kitchen in the wrong place? Are the main rooms disconnected? Is circulation taking up useful floor area? Is there already space that could work much harder? Would changing one relationship between rooms solve several problems at once?

Those questions can completely change the direction of a project.

I do not assume that building more is automatically the answer. On some projects, re-planning the existing house has created the improvement the client wanted without increasing the footprint at all.

Where an extension is justified, I know why it is being built and what it needs to achieve.

Architecture and interiors should not become separate conversations

Decisions made early in an architectural project affect everything that follows.

Where walls sit affects furniture. Window positions affect kitchens and joinery. Ceiling heights affect lighting. Doorways affect circulation. Materials affect both the architecture and the character of the finished rooms.

That is why I prefer to consider the building and its interiors together.

It allows the larger architectural decisions and the smaller detailed ones to support the same idea rather than being resolved independently later.

Looking at the whole house can reveal opportunities that are easy to miss

One project began with a part of the house that had previously been treated largely as circulation space.

By reconsidering how the surrounding rooms connected to it, that area became one of the most frequently used spaces in the home.

The answer did not come from adding another room. It came from looking carefully at what the building already had and questioning how it was being used.

That is the kind of opportunity I am looking for at the beginning of a project.

View Residential Projects →

A personally led practice

You work directly with me.

I want to understand what is not working, why it matters and what you are hoping the property can become before deciding what should be designed.

I am also prepared to challenge an assumption where I think there is a stronger answer.

That might mean questioning an extension, changing the location of an important room, retaining something that initially seemed expendable or spending more in one area so that less needs to be spent somewhere else.

That judgement is a significant part of the job.

Camilla Monk
Architect & Interior Designer