Since its inception in 1996, Jamie Fobert Architects has established a reputation for innovative and inspiring architectural design.
Our clients are diverse: from individual homeowners to major cultural organisations and international retailers. Yet we have demonstrated a consistent approach to resolving client ambitions and site complexities into a tactile architecture of volume, material and light.
We are currently a team of 18 based at Rochelle School in Shoreditch, London.
Our way of working
—We work through an intense and careful iterative design process.
—We endeavour to harness instinctive responses to materiality and form.
—We make architecture that is built with and around light.
—Our design is led by functionality, ease of use, and the sociability that architecture can foster.
—Our spaces are made to endure.
—We resolve even the most complex combination of existing elements into an architecture which in its totality feels singular: an architecture of beauty.
Our experience
Our very first projects included domestic spaces for artists including Antony Gormley and Christopher Le Brun. We then came to work on exhibition design for major galleries, including ‘The Upright Figure’ in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, earning us the opportunity to design galleries themselves for clients including Frieze Art Fair, Pace and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Through this work, we have gained a clear understanding of art practice and installation which has been brought to bear on major arts projects including Tate St Ives in Cornwall, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and, presently in the design phase, the National Portrait Gallery in London. Each responds to a very different context, yet all anticipate current art practice and strive to give each curatorial team maximum freedom.
In our residential projects, we have successfully balanced sensitivity to context with contemporary design concerns. Ranging from urban sites in central London to a farmhouse in rural Ireland and coastal residences in the South of France and Trinidad, our completed houses have all required unique solutions to resolve difficult site constraints. Since winning the RIBA House of the Year Award in 2003 for Anderson House we have been shortlisted a further three times, for Kander House, Luker House and Levring House. In 2016, we won the BD Individual House Architect of the Year Award. We are currently working on houses in Dublin and London.
Our retail design work has provided great opportunity to experiment with form and materiality. One of our earliest retail projects was the design of cantilevered concrete tables and bespoke joinery for AVEDA. We went on to create international design concepts for Givenchy and Versace, capturing the essence of each brand with a unique combination of historic references and surprising innovation. We have a longstanding working relationship with Selfridges, completing their Shoe Galleries in 2010 and their Designer Womenswear Galleries in 2012, and we continue to design new spaces for them today. We designed a beautiful new stone floor for the historic Burlington Arcade. And in 2016, we completed the interiors and bespoke furnishings for a spectacular new department store inside the historic Fondaco dei Tedeschi, by the Rialto Bridge in Venice.
