We design spaces that feel inevitable.
Haven is a studio of eleven people working between architecture, interiors and objects. We take on a small number of projects each year and stay with them from the first site walk to the day the doors open.
Restraint, not invention.
Good buildings rarely announce themselves. They hold a temperature, a quality of light and a set of proportions that make the room feel as though it could not have been arranged any other way.
That result comes from restraint rather than invention. We work with a narrow palette of materials, resolve details early, and spend the remaining time removing everything the project does not need.
Four rules we keep coming back to.
Light first
Orientation and daylight are settled before plan or form. Everything else adjusts around them.
Honest material
Materials are used as themselves — stone as stone, timber as timber — and allowed to age in public.
Fewer moves
One clear structural idea, carried through consistently, outlasts a collection of clever ones.
Built to last
We design for a fifty-year life: repairable details, standard sections, and finishes that improve with wear.
From one room to seven countries.
The studio began in 2014 with a single commission — a stone outbuilding converted into a one-room library. It was small enough that every joint had to be drawn, and that habit stayed.
Since then the work has grown into houses, cultural spaces, workplaces and the furniture that fills them, across seven countries. The method has not changed: a short brief, a long conversation, and drawings that are finished before anything is built.
Studio founded
Two people and one commission, working from a borrowed room in Lisbon.
First cultural project
A small regional gallery opened the studio's work to public buildings.
Objects workshop
A furniture practice was added so that rooms and their contents could be drawn together.
Working internationally
Projects underway across seven countries, with the studio still deliberately small.
Everything is drawn in-house.
- Architecture
- Interior design
- Spatial strategy
- Furniture design
- Lighting design
- Material research
- Art direction
- Site supervision
Materials we return to
- Rammed earth · Lime-washed masonry · Cross-laminated timber · Local schist
- Clay plaster · Untreated oak · Waxed concrete · Terracotta
- Patinated bronze · Unlacquered brass · Linen · Blackened steel