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INSIGHTS
He asserts that the user and how they will use the space is at the heart of everything, rather than purely aesthetic goals: “Rather than trying to design a beautiful house, you design a house that functions, and is beautiful,” says Moreno Masey. “The starting point is always to ask the client how they will use the space, so that you end up with a house that is designed for living in but is also in itself beautiful.”
NEW LEVELS OF LUXURY
The Holland Park residence is connected by a sculptural stone staircase © Julian Abrahams
design “beautifully and sustainably, with efficiency of materials and space,” while avoiding “imposing our vision on clients.” Like many practices, the pandemic taught MorenoMasey that being flexible and adaptable is the only way to survive in challenging global circumstances. As well as implementing cloud services, flexible working and centralised information sharing, culturally, they have changed a lot, says Rod. “We are more agile, more responsive and more open to new ways of collaborating and designing.” However, the value of face to face contact has not been forgotten, with both clients and colleagues. Rod recognises they need to maintain this into the future: “We are ultimately a studio built around understanding people deeply, and spaces physically, and this does not happen from behind a screen.” However, Rod believes the practice has gained a reputation for adaptability, especially to projects that might be unusual or challenging in how they’re structured. In solving the client’s problem, the practice is always keen to provide an architectural solution. “Can you be adaptable, and can you solve problems beautifully, elegantly and simply? Those are our goals,” says the practice’s founder.
Not vertically challenged
When working with clients wanting to reconfigure a house that isn’t working spatially, Rod’s maxim is that if you make the horizontal and vertical circulation work simply for users, the rest of the house tends to ‘design itself.’ He explains: “Whenever you are given a complicated plan where the client is trying to reinvent the house, we will always start with the vertical circulation, as the one defining thing that will fix the spaces.” Aesthetically, the practice takes a proactive approach in order to try and circumvent the risk of a ‘tennis match’ between clients and architects or clients and consultants; “batting ideas back and forth with no-one really understanding what they’re actually getting.” MorenoMasey tries to aim for clarity and consensus through “peeling back layers of communication so that you have absolute clarity in briefing, in design stages and in the sign-off process,” says Rod. He states this will “ensure everyone is delighted with the end result, and not surprised.”
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Sustainability as a default Rod admits that the business wasn’t founded explicitly around the idea of sustainability as the main goal, and many clients haven’t typically prioritised ‘eco’ aspects as yet. He says this remains a challenge in their residential work, whereas many hospitality clients are fully aligned to carbon neutral and sustainability aims. The practice however instils in their team the idea that sustainability is not an optional extra, and is fundamental to what they do. This results in a situation where clients “have to take sustainability out of a project rather than add it in – they may try to steer us away, but we definitely start from that position,” comments Rod. He believes that to positively influence clients on sustainability, “framing the question to make sustainability sound like a requirement rather than an option is key.” With the practice being, by his own admission, “refurbishment specialists,” he believes it’s their job to “ensure as many of these sustainability aims are met as possible.”
MorenoMasey is investing behind a strategy of growing its sustainability credentials; they have pledged that all designers will be Passivhaus and EnerPHit (Passivhaus retrofit) trained over the next 12 months, and two are already fully trained in both.
Achievements
Rod believes that the most difficult question for his firm to answer is whether its greatest achievement is a building, or its progress as a business. “I don’t know whether the biggest wins would be architectural. We’ve done some beautiful signature projects, and I think I probably take that for granted. I think our greatest achievement is having got where we have with the business. It’s been harder than any building you can imagine,” answers Rod. One key project Rod pinpoints is a two-level basement in Holland Park, west London. “Our brief was simply to make this an extraordinary home, without compromise and without wasting opportunities,” says Rod. Once establishing what was acceptable for this detached Victorian villa in a conservation area, the client’s brief was brought to fruition, in 13,000 ft2
with three floors above ground and two floors below. They are all connected by a sweeping, sculptural stone staircase.
Future
MorenoMasey is very much a collaborative enterprise. They are turning the focus onto teaching as well as design; to create brilliant architects as well as great buildings, as “working in a mid size practice as a general practitioner doing amazing architectural work is just not taught.” By focusing on training in practice, the idea is that Rod will become a supporter of that system rather than a leader, forming the agenda.
“If I only shared examples of how I would do it, I would only get versions of what I would do,” he concludes. “If I teach people the things that I have learned, then they will take that experience and potentially take the business to places that perhaps I couldn’t; that surely is a much more interesting future than whatever I could have imagined.” g
ADF NOVEMBER 2022
of seamless luxury living
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