A profile of the studio · Ten minutes' read
The house is the client.
Words by the studio · Portraits by Elin Marsh · Updated spring 2026
The Hewer Street studio on a sampling day: clay pigments, waxed oak, and three hundred fabric bolts.
Maren Voss founded the atelier in 2011 with a conviction that has not moved since: a house already knows what it wants to be, and the designer's job is to listen before drawing. Fourteen years and sixty-eight homes later, the studio remains deliberately small — six people, eight projects a year, no junior handoffs.
The work begins with the fabric of the building. Before a single sample board is made, the team surveys plasterwork, floor levels, light at four times of day, and the awkward corners every old house hides. What survives of the original is kept and repaired; what was lost is remade by the same small circle of plasterers, joiners and weavers the studio has worked with for a decade.
We are not making photographs. We are making Tuesday evenings, birthday breakfasts, the chair someone reads in for thirty years.
Maren Voss, founder
That patience shows commercially as well as aesthetically. Most commissions arrive by referral from past clients, several of whom have now done two or three houses with the studio. The waiting list runs to roughly six months — a fact the atelier mentions apologetically, and its clients mention with some pride.
Maren Voss, photographed at the studio, March 2026.
The founder
Maren Voss
Trained in furniture-making in Copenhagen before studying interior architecture in London, Maren spent seven years at a heritage-restoration practice before opening her own studio. She still draws every scheme by hand and personally attends every site visit in the first and final months of a project.
Her work has been recognised with the BIID Residential Award (2023), and she lectures annually on material honesty at the Architectural Association.
How we work
Three principles, held stubbornly
Listen to the building
Survey first, sketch second. The proportions, light and history of a house set the scheme's rules before taste enters the room.
Honest materials
Lime plaster, solid timber, wool, linen, unlacquered metal. Nothing that pretends to be something else; everything that improves with wear.
Few projects, done fully
Eight commissions a year, each led personally from first survey to final picture hook. We would rather decline work than dilute it.
The studio in time
Fifteen years, briefly
- 2011
- The studio opens above a framer's shop in Notting Hill with one client and a borrowed drawing board.
- 2016
- First full-house commission published in The World of Interiors; the waiting list begins.
- 2020
- The atelier moves to Hewer Street and opens its materials library — now three hundred bolts, forty clays, and a wall of timber samples.
- 2025
- Sixty-eighth house completed; the studio caps its intake at eight projects a year, permanently.