Studio
A small studio, deliberately.
AVERLY is an architect-led design-and-build practice in Clerkenwell, founded in 2009. We stay small so that every house gets the same senior hands.
Origin
Begun in a joinery workshop.
Thomas Averly spent his first years as an architect watching good drawings become ordinary buildings in other people's hands. In 2009 he took the lease on a former joinery workshop in Clerkenwell, hired a carpenter before he hired a draughtsman, and began taking whole houses: design, engineering, building, finish.
The practice has never grown past a dozen people. It has never needed to. Six commissions a year, each led by an architect who also walks the site, signs the steel and checks the hinges.
The name comes from the Old English for an enduring clearing. A place made with intent, and made to last.
2009
Founded in Clerkenwell
6
Commissions a year, at most
12
People, no layers between
Approach
Four habits, seventeen years long.
- 01
Listen
Weeks, not hours. How you live now, and how you expect to live in thirty years. The brief is written before a line is drawn.
- 02
Draw
Measured, engineered, costed. Structure and services are designed with the rooms, never after them. No surprises buried for site.
- 03
Build
Our own site lead, our trusted trades, one accountable team. The architect who drew your house walks it every week.
- 04
Keep
We hand over a house book, return after the first winter, and remain reachable for the life of the building.
What we hold to
Discretion
Most of our clients arrive by introduction. Most of our work is never photographed. Privacy is part of the brief.
Craft
Few materials, known deeply. Joinery made to be repaired, not replaced. Details you notice in year ten.
Permanence
We build for the second and third owners, people we will never meet. Fashion is not a structure.
Candour
Honest costs, honest programmes, honest advice. If a house does not need us, we will say so.
Contact
The kettle is usually on.
Studio
The Old Joinery
14 Baltic Mews, Clerkenwell
London EC1V 4JD
Hours
Monday to Thursday, nine to six.
Fridays we are on site.
Visits by appointment.
Enquiries
If you are planning a house, we should talk.
A first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. We take on six commissions a year; the diary for next year opens in autumn.