A building should be judged in its tenth year, not on the day the scaffolding comes down.
The handover photograph is the least useful image of a building
It is taken on the one day the building will never look like again. Nothing has weathered, nobody has moved in, the brass is still yellow and the timber is still brown. It shows you our work at the exact moment it has been tested least.
So this site is drawings. A plan tells you how a building is organised, a section tells you what it is like to stand in, and an elevation tells you what the street gets. None of them can flatter us, because none of them is about light.
We will send photographs. We take them at five and ten years, and we are happy to show you a wall that has moved, because a wall that has moved and is fine is worth more than a wall that is new.
Kettle Fold
A house for two people who wanted one room they could not leave. Built into the fall of an existing drystone fold, arranged so that the courtyard takes the weather off the western approach before the front door has to deal with it.
- Area
- 214 m²
- Status
- Complete
Bonnington Bond
A whisky bond emptied in 1987 and wet ever since. Six apartments, and a four-month argument about how much of a ruin a client is allowed to keep.
- Area
- 410 m²
- Status
- Complete
Coldstream Reading Room
Ninety-six square metres of village reading room, funded by subscription over four years, and built by two joiners and a mason who all live within eleven miles of it.
- Area
- 96 m²
- Status
- Complete
“We were asked whether the new boards could be stained to match. They could. Ask again in forty years, when the answer will have changed by itself.”
Coldstream Reading Room, 2022
A short palette, used repeatedly, understood properly. We would rather know six materials well enough to predict them than specify sixty and be surprised.
Caithness flagstone
Split rather than sawn, so the face keeps the ripple the bed was laid down with. Laid wet in winter it darkens to near-black and stays that way for a fortnight. We use it where a floor has to continue past a threshold without a change of material, because it is one of the few stones that does not resent the transition.
Douglas fir
Specified unfinished above head height and oiled below it, which is the line most hands reach. The distinction is not decorative: an oiled surface can be maintained and an unfinished one is allowed to grey, and a building is easier to look after when it is honest about which is which.
Lime harl
Thrown, not floated. A harled wall reads as one surface at fifty metres and as a thousand decisions at one metre, which is the right way round. It also lets a wall dry, which matters more in Galloway than any thermal argument we could make for it.
Board-marked concrete
The grain is a record of the formwork, so it is also a record of the order the work was done in. We set the board widths on the drawings rather than leaving them to the pour, because a surface that will be there in eighty years deserves to have been drawn.
Reclaimed Baltic pine
Dense, slow-grown, and impossible to buy new at this quality. Lifted, de-nailed, thicknessed and relaid. Roughly one board in five was beyond saving, which is a good yield and still means the new boards have to be admitted rather than disguised.
Sand-cast brass
Unlacquered, so it goes from yellow to brown to a settled dull gold over about three years depending on how often it is touched. Handles darken first, and unevenly. We tell clients this at the specification stage, because a client who is expecting it reads it as patina and a client who is not reads it as a defect.
Aperture Studio
2F Bonnington Road Leith, Edinburgh EH6 5JD
studio@aperture.example
Aperture Studio is a fictional architecture practice. The projects, people and materials here were written to demonstrate a real content model and a real front end, and no client is involved or implied. Designed and built in-house by Lumina Development as evidence for custom brand websites.