Every project is approved once and then decided a thousand times after that. The approval is the easy part. What follows is eighteen months of capable people making reasonable, defensible decisions. The architect solves a structural problem. Operations asks for one more door. Procurement finds a finish with a shorter lead time. Value engineering takes its share. No one does anything wrong, and the building that opens is often not quite the building anyone originally approved.

My work is holding the original ambition together across that distance. I establish what a place needs to achieve before anyone draws it, direct the design against those requirements, and stay with it through procurement, cost control, technical coordination and construction until the doors open.

In practice that means defining the brief and the parameters, the operational, commercial and spatial requirements a project has to meet before the first sketch exists. It means commissioning and directing design teams, chairing reviews and managing approvals. It means integrating architecture, interiors, brand, FF&E, technical disciplines and operations around one coherent idea instead of letting them compete. And it means seeing the project through delivery, which is where a concept either survives or gets given away.

I work across hospitality and retail rather than in a single specialist corner. Hotel rooms and public areas, food and beverage, coworking and offices, meetings and events, stores and flagships, wellness, and the back of house infrastructure that makes everything else work. The work spans new build as well as fit-out, refurbishment, rebrand and portfolio wide rollout across properties that are already open and trading, the more complex version of the job.

That range is the point. A hotel lobby, a restaurant and a store are largely the same problem in different clothes. They fail in similar places, at different times of day. Knowing where those pressure points are and addressing them early is most of what I bring to a project.

I have spent more than twenty years delivering projects across Europe and the United States. I trained as an architect, hold a Master of Architecture, and have continued my studies more recently at Oxford Saïd and at Cambridge. I am based in Amsterdam and work internationally.