About
A practice built around one appointment.
Lapunne designs homes and leads their delivery: architecture, interiors and the running of the work held together, so nobody is left owning the gap in the middle.
The practice
Most residential projects are assembled from parts. An architect draws it, someone else specifies the interior, a builder prices it, and the client discovers halfway through that the joins are theirs to manage. The work that falls between those appointments is precisely the work that decides whether the house is any good.
Lapunne exists to keep the whole project connected.
We lead the work from design through planning and other approvals, procurement and construction. Where specialist input is needed, we bring in and coordinate the right engineers, surveyors, consultants and contractors, making sure their work remains aligned with the brief, budget and programme.
You are not left managing a collection of separate teams. You have one clear point of contact, one coordinated direction and someone keeping sight of the whole project from the first decisions through to handover.
We work across Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, taking a small number of projects each year. That is a deliberate limit rather than a stage we are hoping to grow out of.
The philosophy
A good house is mostly decided early, in the part of a project where almost nothing appears to be happening. Layout, light, how the rooms relate to each other and to the garden. These cost an afternoon to change at concept stage and a great deal more once anything is built.
So the effort goes in at the front, and the client's attention is spent on the handful of decisions that genuinely shape the house rather than on the several hundred that do not need them.
You make the decisions that shape the home. We coordinate what it takes to deliver them.
Who is behind it
One architect, and a project manager.
The practice is led by an architect registered with the Architects Registration Board and a Chartered Member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who is also a Project Management Professional certified by the Project Management Institute.
That second qualification is the unusual one. Design training teaches you to resolve a building; it does not teach you to run the programme, the procurement and the contract that turn the drawing into a house. Holding both is what makes a single appointment across the whole of a project honest rather than merely convenient.
It is also why the practice takes competence seriously as a question rather than a formality. In the UK the title architect is protected, but the work is not. Anyone may design your home, and since October 2023 checking that they are competent to do it has been your legal duty as the client. Asking us the same questions we would ask on your behalf is entirely reasonable.
Why we build software
Every project teaches the practice something about how this work should be organised: how information moves, where things get dropped, what a client actually needs to see and when. Rather than keeping those lessons in-house as habit, we build them into systems other practices can use. It keeps our own process honest, because a process you have to write down is a process you have to be able to defend.
See what a full engagement covers.
What we handle, what you decide, and how a project runs from first conversation to the last detail.