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 in Shoreditch, London.
—We work through an intense and careful iterative design process.
—We take a well-informed, creative and integrated approach to sustainability.
—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 find innovative ways to achieve long-term social, economic and environmental benefits.
—We resolve even the most complex combination of existing elements into an architecture which in its totality feels singular: an architecture of beauty.
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, the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Each responds to a very different context, yet all anticipate current art practice and strive to give each curatorial team maximum freedom. In 2019 we won the BD Architect of the Year Gold Award, in recognition of our work on public buildings, and our projects have twice been shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize: Tate St Ives in 2018 and the National Portrait Gallery in 2024.
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, London and Portugal.
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 had a long working relationship with Selfridges, completing their Shoe Galleries in 2010, Designer Womenswear Galleries in 2012 and Men's Designer Street Room in 2018. We designed a beautiful new stone floor for London's 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 in Venice. Currently we are developing an international design concept for quality distiller, The Macallan.