Artefact: practice widens its scope after impressing with home extensions

Artefact was born on a beach, and in a hurry. Founders Daniel Marmot and Benedetta Rogers were working at the same London practice, and taking on small side projects, when the opportunity arose to do a new build house together. 

With some family and friends in tow, they took a trip to Southend to consider their options. In the depths of the pandemic, with the world already upside down, it seemed a good moment to take the plunge.

The move might not have been long-planned, but neither was it precipitous. ‘I’d always been clear I didn’t want my own practice too early,’ says Marmot. ‘In your mid-thirties you’ve learned enough to feel confident about doing the work.’

Both founders had wide-ranging on-the-job experience. They had delivered small and large buildings at several firms, most recently Henley Halebrown. Separately, they’d also done stints at public realm practice Publica, getting involved in research and policy development. 

There was some entrepreneurial grounding too. As Studio RO\ST, Rogers had produced self-initiated or self-built projects including AirDraft for the Architecture Foundation. Having added an inflatable enclosure to a disused barge, she devised an events programme and toured the structure around the canal network.

‘One thing that characterises our generation has been the shift away from old-fashioned architecture towards other forms of socially engaged practice, from pop-up projects to offices doing consultation or strategy work,’ says Marmot. ‘We’ve always enjoyed that too, but when we talked about our business plan, our priority was clear: let’s build stuff.’

First house follows accomplished domestic extensions

That's easier said than done, of course. Four years on from the commission, their first house has only just got planning consent, despite evident sensitivity to its Hampstead setting. Wrapping around an ash tree, it straddles a step in the site which will be embanked with earth bags as part of a diligent sustainability strategy.

In the meantime, though, the pair have completed a clutch of accomplished domestic extensions. The immediacy of that work – seeing something appear on site soon after being drawn – has been an enjoyable ‘revelation’ after the slow-burn of estate regeneration at Henley Halebrown. They’ve also made forays into public building, including a low-budget community centre in the undercroft of a 1950s Hackney church.

All of that has been handled by the two partners, who work from a compact studio on an industrial estate in South Tottenham. It’s the kind of place where the customised bicycles of assorted creatives pack the entrance hall, while skip lorries thunder up and down the road outside. 

Though Marmot and Rogers have different characters, they explain, there is a shared design sensibility. They like to look for inspiration in diverse cultures, and aim to make buildings that combine a rational, easily-explained logic with moments of ‘disorder’ that create distinctive identity. The craft of architecture is a central preoccupation, as is a curious, critical attitude to construction. Why, they ask, must we accept the inevitability of the concrete frame or cavity wall? 

They tend to look after their own schemes, but make time for day-long design workshops over a roll of tracing paper. ‘We push and pull in different directions,’ says Marmot, ‘and then there’s a moment where it crystallises in something neither of us would have done alone.’

Drawing from culture and nature

Material samples dotted around the studio give an impression of recent work in distilled form. Rich reds and chalky blues show a knack for harmonising colour. Projects such as the Pirouette House extension, in Islington, feature bold but tasteful palettes that jump off the page or screen – not that the architects had ‘Instagram moments’ in mind, they hasten to point out.

‘We’re not scared of colour, but don’t approach projects thinking, “Where shall we put it on this one?”,’ says Rogers. ‘It’s always been a specific response to the context.’ 

In the Triangle House, an enfilade extension to a 1950s suburban Surrey home, blue-pigmented concrete, terracotta spandrels and a yellow-painted ceiling are references to the client’s heritage, and were drawn from the book Caribbean Style. The bright accents also ameliorate a lean, almost spartan structure. Walls are constructed from a single leaf of hollow blockwork, with mineral wool insulation and render to the outside – a product of the architects’ interest in simple, monolithic construction that can cut cost and carbon while adding character.

Samples in the studio also point to that line of inquiry. In one corner there are giant unfired bricks made of clay-rich earth and chopped straw, under consideration for the Hampstead house. On the desks sit bricks of Portland stone, pitted and veined so that they resemble bars of tasty nougat.

A series of projects exploring mineral construction began with a pavilion for Clerkenwell Design Week: a lightweight roof rested on columns of stone bricks, and a bench seat made from ‘unloved’ limestone slabs whose superficial faults would see them rejected for most uses. For a development site in Cambridge, the practice proposed an unbuilt communal pavilion again using limestone, from nearby Lincolnshire, to give a sense of history and durability to a temporary structure.

Scaling up

For the Davidson Prize ideas competition they imagined a sheltered hamlet of affordable homes on the Isle of Portland. Built from local stone and seaweed, Bedrock would create both economic benefit and real cultural connection. 

It is ‘mindblowing’, the pair say, that housing on the peninsula is usually made from products shipped from around the world and slathered in dismal pebbledash, when rich resources lie just beneath.

Bedrock hints at the scale of buildings Marmot and Rogers would like to work on, without leaving behind the domestic work that allows rapid prototyping of ideas. They have teamed up with others to enter European housing competitions, but at home face the Catch-22 situation where public clients want to see similar past work.

One recent commission for a pair of houses in rural Somerset does bring an incremental increase in scale, and broadens the client list to include commercial developers. The practice has also turned down offers, says Rogers, which would have required expanding the team but held little architectural interest.

For now, the pair continue to enjoy the energising stimulus of being hands-on in all aspects of research, design and site work. After a fast start, growth will come in good time.

See more promising practices with RIBAJ’s Future Winners.