Kim Neville explores WGP’s 20-year journey, including how it trademarked a model for human-centred, sustainable design, while pursuing AI and a collaborative culture to drive impactful architecture.
WGP is a relatively young practice, founded just 20 years ago. As with many emerging firms, the early years presented challenges – maintaining financial stability while growing the client base and balancing expansion with a commitment to design quality.
Origins & setup
From the outset, the practice aimed to become a commercial studio capable of delivering architecture at scale while contributing to innovation in design. At the heart of the firm is a philosophy rooted in wellness, a principle that continues to shape its work today. As the team puts it: “We believe architects should contribute to and improve people’s experience and lives.”
Sustainability has since become a central driving force for the company. Even before this sharpened focus, there was a strong interest in material efficiency, and what the practice describes as ‘appropriate forms’ of construction – embedding efficiency into schemes from the outset. They compare the ethos to “how a product designer would approach design for manufacture, but built in from the beginning.” Alongside this technical approach, as it grew, the firm explored how efficiency could inform spatial experience, articulation and architectural complexity.
These early steps enabled the practice to evolve naturally, supported by a pragmatic sustainability focus; one that responds proactively to the climate crisis. The company explains the approach: “Our Efficient Architecture™ manifesto – more with less – has evolved into a holistic approach to sustainability: identifying opportunities and solving them with as few moves as possible.”
A clear definition of responsibilities across the senior leadership team is core to the practice’s modus operandi. Strategic vision, operational stability, problem-solving leadership and specialist interior expertise are seen as complementary drivers that allow the firm to grow, while remaining aligned with its core values.
The firm’s origins lie in hospitality and high-end residential projects, with leisure also entering the portfolio early on due to personal interests in fitness. Over time, it developed a strong reputation across the full spectrum of residential work, from student accommodation and Build-to-Rent schemes to later living and care sectors, as well as emerging models such as co-living.
While WGP may have pivoted from their early hospitality focus, the learnings from those foundations remain evident. The experiential qualities and interior architectural thinking developed in that sector continue to inform its residential and wellness projects, an approach the team believes “translates particularly well.”
Culture & ethos
Internally, WGP operates a hybrid working model but continues to value face-to-face collaboration, particularly in relation to training and professional development.
The company’s leadership style has evolved through ongoing learning and self-reflection. As the leadership notes, “We have a diverse company across every metric, and we feel that contributes to a culture built around collaboration and shared values.” The firm recognises that as it expands, adapting processes to best support teams while maintaining efficiency is crucial.
WGP defines and measures the value of design as a combination of sustainability, inclusivity, functionality, and social impact. Each element carries merit on its own, contributing both quantitatively and qualitatively to design value. However, the firm observes that the most meaningful outcome emerges when these factors intersect: “The result we find most telling, the one that seems to emerge from all of them together, is the contentment and satisfaction of the team.”
Efficient Architecture™ represents WGP’s 20-year journey distilled into a teachable, scalable design framework. Their path has been fairly linear, beginning with a focus on construction, fabrication, offsite manufacturing, and material efficiency. Over time, they have come to understand that these are not ends in themselves, but tools to enhance human experience, embrace complexity and support financial sustainability. They continue to build on this foundation adding layers to address the full spectrum of sustainability but always through efficient, thoughtful approaches.
Design process
WGP does not follow a fixed signature design approach; instead, the firm focuses on problem-solving rather than trends or fashions. That said, they admit there is an element of recognisability in a WGP building, even if that was never the firm’s explicit intention.
Sustainability runs throughout, using targets that are both “measurable and meaningful.” They are harnessing computational and AI methods to “quickly checking KPIs as we design, and adjust in response to the data. 2026 will hopefully be the year that this process is fully embedded.”
The firm places strong emphasis on clear, consistent client communication, embracing the challenges. “We have worked through some genuinely difficult moments very collaboratively with clients.” They say this clarity is also applied to the practice leaders’ role, to help get the most out of the team: “Defining the leadership roles is part of a process that establishes identities that speak to our values, allowing us to effectively lead the talented people on our team at scale and pace.”
As a result the trust it has built with clients (seen as the firm’s biggest achievement) has enabled the securing of prominent schemes and “fostered a culture where teams, past and present, are supported to grow and develop.”
The practice believes that as architecture becomes more “data-rich and interconnected,” it is well set up to benefit, being “grounded in second-order cybernetics and systems thinking, with an emphasis on feedback loops and the observer’s role within the system.”
As well as monitoring KPIs, they are using AI to interpret complex data, and “support the calculations that inform sustainable design.” And, by embedding “meaningful feedback” into the design process, they aim to make their Efficient Architecture concept measurable.
Projects
One of WGP’s most striking projects, The Folly, was a unique commission for a modern folly, a ‘consciously sculptural’ sustainable building discreetly set within the gardens of an Arts and Crafts country house. “Part lookout, part entertaining space, and part retreat, and is unashamedly free of typical building constraints, celebrating its beautiful surroundings.”
The modular primary structure and layered approach to internal and external cladding use recycled and recyclable timber and aluminium, allowing components to be replaced to extend the building’s design life. The free-spanning internal space provides flexibility of use, while prefabricated transportable leaves and screw piles can be relocated and repurposed elsewhere.
The logarithmic spiral form minimises surface area and reduces heat loss. The building’s height, combined with rainscreen cladding, was planned to facilitate effective ventilation. In-house solar gain simulations informed the form, orientation, and location of glazing, supporting mitigation measures such as overhanging eaves to reduce overheating, thermal mass from rafts and highly insulated cassettes to retain solar gain, and partial burial of the structure to regulate temperatures.
Operationally, the building relies on an all-electric solution, with a heat pump served by geothermal piles, below-ground plant with minimal visual or acoustic impact, and underfloor water-fed pipework. Beyond embodied carbon, operational carbon and therefore whole life carbon were important drivers for the design.
Another prominent project for WGP is the Theatre Square & NW2 Participation Building. Central Ipswich offered an unusual challenge: a 1960s public space above a hidden spiral car park, featuring a disused fountain bowl, with a developer willing to fund transformation provided parking was retained below. The goals were an expanded New Wolsey Theatre and a gateway statement for the local authority, to support wider regeneration.
The main constraint was the car park below. WGP worked with the existing corkscrew concrete structure rather than against it, aligning the new building’s form with the structural grid below. No new foundations were required, and the 282 m2 timber structure sits on hidden beams resting on the original surface. “Material efficiency guided fabrication,” say the practice; the panelised timber superstructure was fabricated offsite in sections. A projecting gold canopy uses a 5 mm folded steel plate, made of interlocking segments.
Looking ahead
The firm identifies its main challenge as maintaining design quality while scaling the business, and sees its Efficient Architecture “manifesto” as central to this. They explain that it gives the team a clear framework to work within as the practice grows. By embedding the firm’s ethos and values fully, they can bring new people in without diluting what makes the work successful.
WGP is enthusiastic about embracing opportunities, particularly “responsive architecture” that incorporates principles of cybernetics. As the climate continues to change, they are exploring how buildings, urban design and landscape can adapt in real time to human, environmental, and technical variables.