El Salvador-born Rodrigo Moreno Masey saw an opportunity to set up his own London practice 12 years ago, and hasn’t looked back. He tells ADF’s Laura Shadwell why keeping it simple is the key to success
MorenoMasey was created on the back of one of life’s “too good to pass up” opportunities, says founder and studio principal, Rodrigo Moreno Masey. He was working at architects Michaelis Boyd when he was introduced to a developer, via one of his wife’s friends. Rod was offered the chance to work on his own project comprising four apartments and a duplex penthouse in Trafalgar Square.
Rod was given time by the partners to work on the development, and on the back of this high-profile project, he launched MorenoMasey. Within a short space of time, the firm had grown to a size that was significantly larger than he had imagined.
Simplifying the structure
At its peak, four years ago, the practice boasted 22 members of staff. In a move unrelated to Covid, although accelerated by the pandemic, they began to adopt a different strategy in terms of how the business was structured.
Rodrigo soon found that in order to deliver the projects at the rate required, more and more layers of management were being introduced. However, the outcome was that each layer took the most talented and trusted people one step further away from designing projects. “So in the end,” says Rod, “the people doing the work on the ground were the least experienced and the least embedded within the culture of our practice.” The new structure was essentially to turn the business setup on its head, so that the architects are as close as possible to the projects.
The practice is now organised around the idea of a ‘pool’ of specialists which the practice can dip into, according to the project involved. They regularly work with outside consultants – including for heritage, planning and visualisation, on a semi-retainer basis. “Having such a big pool can really accelerate the initial advice given at the briefing stage, as the information is based on proper knowledge, rather than speculation,” says Rod.
The practice has adopted an open and collaborative way of designing the projects, and aims to involve everyone that wants to attend, from junior to senior architect level. Bringing the whole creative team to the table early, and agreeing goals and roles, means that clarity is achieved.
Commissions currently divide roughly into 30% in hospitality and 70% in the residential sector. The studio has and continues to work with a range of restaurant brands, Nando’s being one. Residential sector work ranges from one-off bespoke houses to multi unit, mixed use or regeneration schemes.
Flexible problem solvers
The practice’s ethos is also simple. Rather than specialising in a certain type of project or having a fixed aesthetic, MorenoMasey position themselves as “problem solvers,” and “curators of the client’s vision.” The designers instead focus on “extracting and distilling” each project’s unique set of opportunities and challenges from the client, in order to inform designs, says Rod. They aim to design “beautifully and sustainably, with efficiency of materials and space,” while avoiding “imposing our vision on clients.”
Like many practices, the pandemic taught MorenoMasey that being flexible and adaptable is the only way to survive in challenging global circumstances. As well as implementing cloud services, flexible working and centralised information sharing, culturally, they have changed a lot, says Rod. “We are more agile, more responsive and more open to new ways of collaborating and designing.” However, the value of face to face contact has not been forgotten, with both clients and colleagues. Rod recognises they need to maintain this into the future: “We are ultimately a studio built around understanding people deeply, and spaces physically, and this does not happen from behind a screen.”
However, Rod believes the practice has gained a reputation for adaptability, especially to projects that might be unusual or challenging in how they’re structured. In solving the client’s problem, the practice is always keen to provide an architectural solution. “Can you be adaptable, and can you solve problems beautifully, elegantly and simply? Those are our goals,” says the practice’s founder.
Not vertically challenged
When working with clients wanting to reconfigure a house that isn’t working spatially, Rod’s maxim is that if you make the horizontal and vertical circulation work simply for users, the rest of the house tends to ‘design itself.’ He explains: “Whenever you are given a complicated plan where the client is trying to reinvent the house, we will always start with the vertical circulation, as the one defining thing that will fix the spaces.”
Aesthetically, the practice takes a proactive approach in order to try and circumvent the risk of a ‘tennis match’ between clients and architects or clients and consultants; “batting ideas back and forth with no-one really understanding what they’re actually getting.”
MorenoMasey tries to aim for clarity and consensus through “peeling back layers of communication so that you have absolute clarity in briefing, in design stages and in the sign-off process,” says Rod. He states this will “ensure everyone is delighted with the end result, and not surprised.”
He asserts that the user and how they will use the space is at the heart of everything, rather than purely aesthetic goals: “Rather than trying to design a beautiful house, you design a house that functions, and is beautiful,” says Moreno Masey. “The starting point is always to ask the client how they will use the space, so that you end up with a house that is designed for living in but is also in itself beautiful.”
Sustainability as a default
Rod admits that the business wasn’t founded explicitly around the idea of sustainability as the main goal, and many clients haven’t typically prioritised ‘eco’ aspects as yet. He says this remains a challenge in their residential work, whereas many hospitality clients are fully aligned to carbon neutral and sustainability aims.
The practice however instils in their team the idea that sustainability is not an optional extra, and is fundamental to what they do. This results in a situation where clients “have to take sustainability out of a project rather than add it in – they may try to steer us away, but we definitely start from that position,” comments Rod. He believes that to positively influence clients on sustainability, “framing the question to make sustainability sound like a requirement rather than an option is key.” With the practice being, by his own admission, “refurbishment specialists,” he believes it’s their job to “ensure as many of these sustainability aims are met as possible.”
MorenoMasey is investing behind a strategy of growing its sustainability credentials; they have pledged that all designers will be Passivhaus and EnerPHit (Passivhaus retrofit) trained over the next 12 months, and two are already fully trained in both.
Achievements
Rod believes that the most difficult question for his firm to answer is whether its greatest achievement is a building, or its progress as a business. “I don’t know whether the biggest wins would be architectural. We’ve done some beautiful signature projects, and I think I probably take that for granted. I think our greatest achievement is having got where we have with the business. It’s been harder than any building you can imagine,” answers Rod.
One key project Rod pinpoints is a two-level basement in Holland Park, west London. “Our brief was simply to make this an extraordinary home, without compromise and without wasting opportunities,” says Rod. Once establishing what was acceptable for this detached Victorian villa in a conservation area, the client’s brief was brought to fruition, in 13,000 ft2 of seamless luxury living with three floors above ground and two floors below. They are all connected by a sweeping, sculptural stone staircase.
Future
MorenoMasey is very much a collaborative enterprise. They are turning the focus onto teaching as well as design; to create brilliant architects as well as great buildings, as “working in a mid size practice as a general practitioner doing amazing architectural work is just not taught.” By focusing on training in practice, the idea is that Rod will become a supporter of that system rather than a leader, forming the agenda.
“If I only shared examples of how I would do it, I would only get versions of what I would do,” he concludes. “If I teach people the things that I have learned, then they will take that experience and potentially take the business to places that perhaps I couldn’t; that surely is a much more interesting future than whatever I could have imagined.”