John Wardle

Yeah.

Something of your heart in the building.

Yeah, I think.

Well, honestly, it's hard enough building a building.

It might as well be something you've put everything into.

It still takes just as long.

These projects are deeply thought.

Well, it's a case of not letting go.

Many people also happily start as a small residential practice and then happily dispense with that when they get opportunities for larger work.

I've always tenaciously held on to it.

We don't do a lot of houses, but continually we will have houses in the practice.

And I think to lose confidence in doing a house, you wouldn't come back from it.

They're really difficult to do.

And as I think, unless you start to do them when you're quite young, there's pretty good examples perhaps of people doing this, but rare that you can do a house having never done one before after years of doing hospitals or whatever.

Yeah, well, I think you have to judge them at such a close range and there's that sort of to build in intimacy and the shifts of profiling of spaces that people desire in a house is really quite difficult.

I think you can take the learnings of designing a house to a university building.

We often talk with broad stakeholder groups about aspects of life within a house and how do you translate that in that shift in scale.

Hard to do it the other way around.

Yeah, it's one of those things that's virtually immeasurable, really.

Something about the scale of space, tonality.