At Foster Lomas, some of our most rewarding work is also our most private. We work with clients for whom privacy is critical and their ability to trust us with their private residences is the difference between winning or not winning the work. Because of that, Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) have become intwined with many of our contracts over the last decade and to work within them is now our norm.

This level of privacy, while fully respected, does create a creative challenge for business development; how do we show what we do if we can’t publish our work? How can we show that we are working at all if we can’t talk about it?

All businesses need a way of communicating their brand and confirming their credibility. It’s what drives a business forward, motivating new and existing client loyalty and cementing their brand identity among their peers. It’s not impossible to do this when you can’t talk about what you’re doing, but it’s much, much harder and it’s a challenge that Foster Lomas has had to face up to.

Having been almost completely imbedded in NDAs for more than six years we found that we had quite a big gap in our CV that we needed to explain.

In 2021 we started working on a strategy for how we could do this best. We worked with the Graphic Designers Studio Small to build an identity that celebrated the parts of our business that needed to be obscured – we played with that.

We tapped into our core values: Craft, Character and Context. We focused on what we can show instead of what we can’t – we can show the materials, the process and the detail. We leaned into that, and to our belief in making architecture that is experienced as artform. Our website became our gallery wall, exploring our position as artists and craftspeople who happen also to be in the business of making architecture and interior design.  We considered that architectural marketing and press are often reliant on images of completed projects, but to some degree, the completed project is only a very small part of the architects’ practice and we used that to our advantage. Our models, icons, sketches, and photography of details are not just stand-ins in that regard, they’re a vital part of how we work and how we translate a clients’ brief. It’s honest.

Studio Small helped us bridge the gap in our CV using our branding and website but we still needed a way to encourage people to reach us there. By the time someone has found our website, they’ve already learned something that got them to click through. If our hope is for those people to be prospective clients (it is), then we want that something to be the thing that we do and that we would love to do for them… but shhh, we can’t say.

We found that people were finding our website, they were curious – they could see something beautiful was going on, but they weren’t sure what part we were playing. Were we artisans – glass blowers, blacksmiths, wood turners, joiners, model makers or something else?  And if you get so far as discovering that we’re architects, interior designers and lighting designers, do you know where we work or what we do?

We can’t ignore the fact that prospective clients need to see what we can do and not just how we do it. They need to know that we’re a safe pair of hands and how we can explicitly help them with their project. It’s all well and good being able to show how we work, but there’s no getting away from the fact that we need to be able to prove that we can deliver.

So, in 2022 when we bought an old Print Works unit off Bermondsey Street we treated it as an opportunity to showcase what we do. We became our own client, we ripped up the NDA and we invited everyone to come and see our work.

We’ve created a home for our design team here to come to work in each day which uses the same design principles as any of our residential projects. We’ve worked with the natural light and thermal efficiency afforded by the original building; we’ve collaborated with international crafts people [reflecting our private international portfolio] and trusted consultants to create a place that has a hand-crafted quality, we’ve listened to the client and understood exactly what it is they need from us. It is rich, and warm and a joy to live in. Critically, we are able to talk about it loudly and with abandon. It is a place that we can be proud of, where we can invite colleagues, clients and friends to visit us and we are able to share more of we do and what we continue to do.

It is really our pleasure to be trusted with sensitive projects on the scale that we are, and to be given the opportunity to work in some of the most beautiful places in the world on account of it – we have a deep respect and understanding for our client’s need for this level of privacy. Designing homes is personal and it’s a privilege. So, while the NDA provides us with a challenge, it is one that we will always meet with respect.

Photography by Edmund Sumner and Nick Ballon