Community: In Conversation with Nic and Chris from Field Office Architecture

Your projects seem deeply shaped by context — place, material, and the people involved. What role does collaboration play in keeping your projects grounded?

Collaboration is fundamental for us. Good projects don’t come from a single point of view. They emerge through dialogue, with clients, consultants, builders, and often the site itself. We spend a lot of time listening early on, not just to what people want, but how they live, what they value, and what they are uncertain about. That collective understanding keeps the work grounded and prevents the architecture from becoming self-referential. The best outcomes usually come when everyone involved feels a sense of authorship and responsibility.

Many of your designs feel restrained but never cold. How do you think about warmth, tactility, and human presence when working at different scales?

Restraint for us is about clarity, not austerity. Warmth comes from proportion, light, and material choice rather than surface decoration. We think a lot about how a hand touches a wall, how light falls across timber at different times of day, or how a room feels when it’s occupied rather than photographed. At larger scales, this becomes about sequencing and moments of compression and release. At smaller scales, it’s often in the detail. Human presence is always the measure, if it feels good to inhabit, it’s working.

Are there materials or processes you keep going back to? What keeps drawing you back, and what do they keep teaching you?

We’re consistently drawn to materials that age well and show use over time. Timber, masonry, natural stone, and honest finishes that don’t try to hide their construction. These materials teach patience. They demand care in detailing and reward it over the long term. Process-wise, we often return to drawing and physical thinking, sketching, testing proportions, and revisiting ideas rather than pushing forward too quickly. There’s a lot to be learned by slowing down.

In a design culture that often moves quickly, how do you protect time for thinking, testing, and not knowing — and why does that matter to you?

We actively build time into projects for uncertainty. Not knowing straight away is often where the best ideas come from. That might mean sitting with a plan longer than expected or testing multiple options before committing. It matters because architecture has long consequences. Taking time upfront allows decisions to be more considered, more resilient, and less reactive. It also creates space for quieter ideas to surface, which we think leads to more enduring work.

When specifying furniture and lighting, what are the key considerations that guide your choices? How do those decisions influence the overall feel of a project?

Furniture and lighting are never an afterthought for us. They shape how spaces are used and experienced day to day. We look for pieces that feel purposeful, well made, and appropriate to the architecture rather than competing with it. Lighting is particularly important, we prefer fewer fittings, placed carefully, with an emphasis on atmosphere over brightness. Together, these choices soften spaces, add scale, and bring a sense of lived-in calm that completes the architecture.