Hello, Laura, how are you doing? 

 

Hi David. Very well. Very good to talk to you.

 

And to you. You’re now six months into your post as director of the London office at Stride Treglown, so I wondered if you could just firstly, let me know how that's been, where you came from and what you've experienced in that time. What you've learned?

 

Well, actually, yes. Next week on the 25th it will be six months, so it's flown by, I have to say. It's been a wonderful six months. I had followed Stride Treglown for quite some time before I joined; I always felt their focus on people and planet was something that was very much aligned to what I am as an architect, so I was delighted to get the role. It was a very well-thought-through process of selection for the new regional director for London, so I very much enjoyed that set of interviews. I think it was a good way to cement that it was the right thing for me for my next step in my career. But you know, it turned out it I was the right person for them as well! So, I am very, very happy to be in this role. 

Before that, I had been heading of London for the London studio for Broadway Malyan. I was there 12 years. So: very much used to this, the complexities of this role. A little bit of everything!

 

You've got a diverse background too. What is it, further back?

 

Yes, I was born in Buenos Aires in Argentina, quite a few years ago! My father is Italian; half Italian, half Spanish, and my mum is from Slovak heritage. So yes, quite international as a background. I studied here in the UK, and then in Italy, and I settled here in the UK for work about 21 years ago this September; so, the whole of my professional career. I worked here in London with multidisciplinary practices across sectors – mainly residential. My background is mainly residential and leisure. But doing projects here, and internationally they are often complex, high-value, multidisciplinary teams, managing external teams, internal teams, clients. So yeah, all of those fun things that we like to do!

 

I'm interested in how you interface the London office with the other regional offices; I think you've got nine or so in total. How does the interface work in a practical sense?

 

Well, I think COVID taught us to do it much more than we were obviously doing it before. It is really a big team of 330 people, and there will be regional differences and certain variations in the sector that we look at, from office to office or from studio to studio. But we've got a very close working relationship; all the regional directors of all the nine studios…well, it's actually 11 because the Bristol studio is split into three different studios. We meet every week to discuss pipeline, workload, stresses, opportunities. But also, of course, because we work across an array of sectors and disciplines, we work across studios, we collaborate across regions. For instance, from here, we are working with Bristol interior design and landscape. We're working with the Bath studio as well, in other projects with regards to the Building Safety Act. So the borders of the office don't really exist. I think all of us like to think of it as a big team of 330 architects and designers.

 

You're an employee-owned business and a B Corp as well. What do those two things bring to the firm, do you think?

 

I think they are a reflection of who we are as a practice and a collection of like-minded individuals. We are just recertifying as a B Corp. I don't know if you know, but we were one of the first large practices to certify as a B Corp, and we on course for a rating that is far improved from the first certification. We’re very proud of that, and I think it was a nice way of putting in practice something that Stride Treglown have been advocating for some time, which is having a purpose to the things that we do; having consideration towards having positive impact on communities, on planet, on the people that we work with, the people that we work for. The B Corp certification is something that looks at constant improvement. So, we have to look at ourselves, we have to measure ourselves, the work that we do; the feedback that we get. Feedback from our own teams, feedback from clients, and we need to make sure that that is a continuous improvement cycle. It keeps you on your toes, basically. I think one of the things that attracted me to joining was that ethos, that way of working. So now I'm contributing to that from inside the practice, which is really good.

 

Do people seek you out and employ you because of your B Corp status? I'm thinking about clients.

 

I think it's becoming more and more the norm that practices are certifying, and other consultancies are certifying. That is not necessarily a differentiating factor. What I think it does do is create a community of like-minded people, and we are starting to see opportunities across, in working with B Corps. For instance, we're working with commercial and an office, sort of a creative hub. That is for a B Corp. We know our procurement strategy, our way of procuring also looks at making not alliances, but basically working with other BCorps as well. Or promoting other B Corps or other small B Corps as well. I think it's basically a community of like-minded people, which has the added benefit of creating additional business opportunities. And hopefully, as more and more people certify, it will become an even louder community.

 

Final question: what are we to look out for in terms of Stride Treglown projects in London over the coming years?

 

We are very well placed between public sector and private sector. The London studio in particular is now working on some quite prestigious projects across the higher education sector. We're working for the University of Greenwich, which is obviously a World Heritage Site. We're also working with the University of Westminster up across their campus and the London Metropolitan University as well, across their campus. We are seeing a lot of retrofit work coming in, through our clients and through requirements of the universities' needs, really, to look at their estate and bring that up to date. A lot of the work that we're seeing is creative reuse and retrofit, which obviously is really well aligned with, who we are as a practice. So, what we're going to see is a lot of that and what we will be doing as part of our growth strategy is going into more mixed-use developments through that as well into commercial uses. And obviously through that mixed-use residential as well. So yeah, watch this space! Good

 

Good luck with all of that! Thank you for talking to me.

 

Thank you, David!