Neil Davies

We met with architect Neil Davies in the Kent countryside at the timber-clad flower cutting studio that his practice recently completed for florist Sue Oriel of Country Lane Flowers.

How has moving to the South East coast affected your work? 

Neil.  We moved here from Shepherd’s Bush in September 2020. When I asked my wife, Ali, what she would like to gain from our relocation; she said, “I want to see the sky and the changing of the seasons.” That sounds like a basic thing, but it was a great brief. We found somewhere on the edge of Hastings, and it’s exactly what we imagined it would be. I still have the office in London and the satellite office in New York, but I can’t imagine not having this place now. It’s what drives me and has driven my practice on; it’s been amazing. 

Like many people that relocate, we didn’t have friends or a network when we moved down here but have since met so many great people. I’ve been inspired by the local vernacular of the old buildings in Rye, the Kent peg tiles, the chancels on the oast houses. It might sound trite-and I really don’t mean it to-but having access to the light and nature here that we didn’t have in London has been life-changing. 

Since moving to this area, I’ve worked harder than ever-partly because of the nature of the clients that I have and the different time zones that we work across. I would never have been able to put in that commitment if I was working in London, I know that for a fact. 

“Knowing what drives you creatively or what the trigger points are to fuel that comes with experience in the business. There is an alchemy between general graft and things that spark the imagination.”

I couldn’t imagine putting the genie back in the bottle and heading back to Shepherd’s Bush and having that life again; we’ve moved on from that. 

Tell us about the path you have taken on your career journey to date? 

Neil.  I studied architecture at the University of Wales in Cardiff but prior to that, in 1993, I spent a year living in Berlin and working in Potsdam. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city was undergoing massive change, which I saw in real-time. Going to Cardiff after that was interesting-maybe I should have stayed in Berlin-but hey, that’s life!

Architects study for two degrees-the first is three years and then you work somewhere for a year. I did my placement year in Hamburg, spending a lot of time exploring cities around Germany on the weekends before returning to Cardiff for a year to complete the second degree. After that, I moved to London to learn my craft and work at a contemporary architectural practice. 

In my fifth year, I wrote an ecological paper, my thesis, which was about how to encourage homeowners to upgrade their houses for thermal performance. It’s interesting that something I wrote about 23 years ago is still as relevant now as it was then.

I spent eleven and a half years at a practice in Shoreditch getting trained up from basically tea boy to partner. I gained experience working with different ages of buildings and different construction techniques. I learned about creative reuse of buildings; how to add to and rethink them. All this took a long time to master and understand. 

Florist Sue Oriel of Country Lane Flowers.

How did you come to establish your own practice?

Neil.  In 2011 several clients approached me and offered for me to work exclusively for them. Out of five clients, one client was good to his word, and that was enough for me to start my journey, my business. 

Crucially, you have to win work; you have to find clients that will take a risk with you and invest in you. Then, after a while, that confidence builds; it’s taken me about ten years to build a body of work and know what I’m about and what I stand for. 

Visiting COP26 last year was utterly transformative for my thinking. The intellect and the can-do mentality of the speakers in the Climate Innovation Tent was inspiring. To have the policymakers in the same room as the innovators and crucially the funders-this was the final piece of the jigsaw for me. We were already working on an app that will measure pollution and show its impact on health, and a one hundred per cent off-grid kit build home. It cemented what we are doing, proving that we are on the right track. 

Tell us more about the pollution-measuring app that you are working on.

Neil.  I came up with the idea for the app while taking my daughter out in her buggy around London during the first lockdown. I was looking around, thinking, “why isn’t there an app showing me where there are less polluted streets or areas?” So I decided to set about creating it. 

We’ve named the app Niuviia. We’re about to start working with councils in the UK as part of their pollution reduction initiatives and we plan to roll it out this summer. 

Ultimately Niuviia shows where the pollution is most concentrated and the hope is that the data will enable the public to make an informed choice about the journeys they take. Air pollution is a killer and it costs NHS Trusts tens of million pounds a year but unfortunately, no one is talking about it, so no one knows how bad it is.

And the kit build house?

Neil.  The kit build house we are designing is called Niuhaus and will entirely change how renewable technologies are plugged into a structure. The way we’re building it will change the construction industry forever. We have something that meets emerging policy and will contribute towards the country’s effort to decarbonise by 2050. 

We’re about to build two pilots in the UK in Buckinghamshire and we’ve got ten orders in the US. When it launches customers will be able to order their home using a configurator app on their phone or on the Niuhaus website. Essentially every Niuhaus is the same shape, just different sizes and completely customisable. The configurator tool will enable customers to spin the house around, look into it and get a clear idea of the look and feel of it. The design is universal so you can build one of these anywhere in the world-you could even demount it and move it if you wanted to. It runs completely off-grid and we hope that it will be the springboard for others to follow, because we all have to do our bit. 

“You might call it a guilty pleasure; I get up before anyone else on Saturday morning and I put some of my records on. I’ve got probably an hour and a half of time where I just listen to music and put ideas down on paper.”

Neil Davies
neildaviesarchitects.com
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