We build slowly, from what is close at hand, for people who will still be using the building in fifty years.
Selected work
Four recent projects from the catalogue.
Weir Lane Archive
A record office for a county archive, built in board-marked concrete around a top-lit reading room.
View project
Hollow Court
Eleven dwellings arranged around a shared planted court, each with its own threshold onto it.
View project
The Long Room
A single room reworked as a hall for a village institute — limestone floor, one long oak table.
View project
Stair for a Narrow House
A cantilevered concrete stair standing free of the party wall, turning a corridor into a room.
View projectWhat we do
Three strands of work, usually overlapping.
Architecture
New build and adaptationCivic buildings, housing and one-off houses, from feasibility through to site. We stay on a project until it is finished.
Interiors
Rooms within existing fabricWork inside buildings we did not design — halls, libraries, workplaces — where the constraint is the existing structure.
Research
Materials and groundFunded and self-directed studies into local material supply, reuse and the carbon cost of what we specify.
The studio
Who we are and how we work.
Atlas is a practice of nine, working from a converted grain store in Somerset and a small room in London. We take on around four projects a year, which is fewer than we could, and stay on each one until the last handle is fitted.
We are interested in buildings that are ordinary in the best sense — well made, unfussy, and legible to the people who use them without needing to be explained.
Ellen Marsh and Tom Aveling
- Founded 2011
- Studio Somerset and London
- People Nine
- Projects a year About four
From the journal
Occasional notes on the work.
On drawing the same wall twice
Why we redraw details we have already built, and what changes the second time.
Thirty miles of stone
A note on sourcing within a day's cart ride, and what that constraint does to a design.
The room before the plan
Starting from one room and letting the rest of the building follow it.