THE AGIUS FAMILY – (Claude, Barbara, Claudia and David) AN INSTITUTION Behind ‘Architect on a Scooter’ is some great support and for a long time it has been the Agius family, headed-up by Claude and his family. They are the oldest family run Piaggio Vespa dealer in the UK, since 1951. In...

I arranged for a tutorial with Charlie Mann, a great teacher, architect and urban cowboy. Charlie often wore a blue slim suit, Stetson and cowboy boots. He was one of the most eccentric of my teachers, and a bibliophile. His flat was full of books, on shelves but mainly as columns that you had...

(When the architect simply can’t concentrate) I meet a prospective client at her house. We start a conservation about the house owner’s plans for change. We walk around the house. I get distracted by the faint sweet delicate chime of a little bell. I see this beautiful little creature with...

Aerogel – also referred to as ‘Frozen Smoke’, ‘Solid Smoke’, ‘Solid Air’, ‘Solid Cloud’ and “Blue Smoke’ owing to its translucent nature and the way light scatters in the material. Aerogel is a synthetic porous ultralight material derived from a gel, in which the liquid...

I arrive for a first meeting, there is debris everywhere. The house is a tip. Cannot open the door to some rooms, due to the combination of worn clothes, wrappers, and toys on the floor. Some rooms smell, a lot. I walk around from top – down and then to the garden. The garden is the cleanest...

So I get a call one day from a lady who lives in a big house in Richmond. She asked me to come and look at her house so I went over and I’m met by her at the front door. She drops her keys into my hand and says, ‘have a look around, I’ll see you later.’ So I don’t know what I’m looking...

Pre-fabricated buildings have moved on since the 1950’s and what we have now is a system of building using timber – known as cross-laminated construction – think thick plywood. It is a bit like the way you make a model of a building by cutting up pieces of cardboard to the right shape and...

We found a fun, practical solution to a family’s space problems in Clapham. They didn’t want to move but they needed a study/office. Renting locally wasn’t an option so the idea of the pod – an external structure in the garden – was born. By rehousing the existing study outside of the...

An elderly lady rang me and asked whether we did loft conversions and I said we did. She told me where she lived, which wasn’t far from the office. I said it would be no problem and I’d come on the scooter and she said, ‘can you bring a ladder for the loft’ and I said, ‘no, I’m on the...

I went to a big house which was occupied by only a couple, I think the kids must have left home. He was a big guy and she was quite petite. The brief was to convert the loft into something much bigger and I found it perplexing because the house was so big already. I went up to see it and the space...