Started over a cup of tea.

Our founders were two architects who'd spent a year working from their kitchen tables and missed the bits of an office that nobody puts in the brochure: the person at the next desk, the walk to the station, a reason to put shoes on.

They didn't want a tower in the City. They wanted somewhere ten minutes from home, in a building with some history, where you could get a good desk for a day without signing anything. So they found an empty printworks floor, put down twelve desks and a kettle, and told the neighbours.

Ten years on there are five buildings. Each one was made for something else: ink, rope, milk, pianos, cloth. We keep as much of that as we can, and we pick buildings near where people live rather than where companies have their headquarters.