The case for beginning before the brief

The Real Estate design industry continues to evolve at an accelerated pace. The growth of Ai, the commoditisation of design documentation, the geopolitical pressures on creating viable investment returns and regulatory and shareholder expectations to deliver social, environmental and economic returns have changed our landscape.

For so many years designers or artists were given the space and time to create, perhaps hidden behind more profitable days where economic returns were easier to achieve.  This is no longer the case.

Perhaps because of our origins as retail architects, we saw this early. Clients now enjoy the reassurance of data analysis and commercial strategy at the outset of a project rather than at the end of it. Our commercial strategy team has spent more than thirty years understanding how places trade, who uses them and what makes them work. Our belief is that bringing the thinking of art (design) and science (data) together, from the beginning, increases the chances of success.

What changed and when?

The evolution accelerated around the moment we acquired Pragma, and the pandemic served to accelerate it. We will of course remember that period for the lives lost. But it also changed how our, like so many industries operates. Clients grew used to procuring data and design at a distance with no loss of quality. Multiple people examining one design form different places at different times became normal, and the service we sell became more accessible as a result.

What integration gives a client

Having commercial strategy and design under one roof removes delay. Ideas are tested in real time rather than sent out to a third party. From the beginning there is intelligence feeding the design, so the familiar conflict between an analytics team and a design team never arises. They are wedded together to produce an outcome from day one.

Our commercial strategy team works across the whole asset life cycle and has done for three decades. In the United Kingdom we work with asset managers on the portfolio performance of places that opened ten years ago. Understanding how an asset continues to trade long after it opens is what gives the strategy thinking its richness and its knowledge that can only be built by staying with places over that kind of horizon.

That thinking now sits inside our design work from the first day. At Airport City Mumbai, the commercial strategy team informed the original design and has been embedded in all stages of the design development.

In the nineties and the two thousand’s, proximity was crucial. That produced a hub and spoke model of offices, so we could put people in front of the client quickly. What we have built since is different: an integrated global service delivered from two centres of excellence, in the United Kingdom and China. The knowledge transfer that comes from having every discipline in the same room is the reason it works.

Our clients led us here. They invest across borders, in sectors and services rather than in single markets, and they ask us to work alongside them wherever that takes them. What does not travel is the place. Every project belongs somewhere with its own history, climate, habits and expectations, and the first question is always who the place has a answer to. A hub airport in the Gulf largely serves people passing through, and its success depends on understanding passengers from across Asia and Europe who will never live in the city it sits in. A neighbourhood destination in the same country answers almost entirely to the people who walk it. Getting that judgement wrong at the outset is one of the most expensive mistakes available in development, because the people compare, and they choose with their feet.

So the work starts there, with how a place is already used and by whom, before anything is proposed about what can be added. Our architects come from forty-two countries, so an understanding of culture, people and place is built into the studio before a project starts.

Where that leaves us

We enter our eightieth year working on what we have always worked on: world class, large-scale, mixed-use projects for leading developers. Operators and investors. What has changed is how we do it. An integrated service from two centres of excellence, combining data and design. Our recent appointment to Adani’s design consultant panel follows directly from that. If you are early in thinking about a project, before the brief has settled, that is the point at which we are most useful. It is also, in our experience, the point at which decisions that matter most are still open.