Ten years of Austin Design Works
This week, Austin Design Works turns ten.
We’ll be celebrating with a party at Minchinhampton Rugby Club which, rather fittingly, is also one of our own architectural projects. It feels like a good place to gather friends, clients and collaborators and raise a glass to a decade of designing buildings, landscapes and places together.
Ten years sounds like a long time. And looking back at the breadth of work we have been lucky enough to be part of, perhaps it is.
There is every chance you already know some of our projects without necessarily knowing they were ours. Horsley Community Play Park, The Walled Garden at Stroud’s Museum in the Park and Stroud Brewery’s extraordinary canal-side home are all part of the Austin Design Works story.
But so too are family homes tucked down Cotswold lanes, listed buildings carefully brought back to life, gardens grown around new architecture, rural sites navigating complex planning questions and projects much further from home, including as far afield as Cornwall.
Architecture and landscape, together
Austin Design Works is led by siblings Matthew Austin, Chartered Architect, and Rachael Emous-Austin, Chartered Landscape Architect and professional garden designer.
From the beginning, one of the things that has made our studio a little different is the way architecture and landscape can sit alongside one another.
A building doesn’t exist in isolation. Neither does a garden. How you approach a house, what you see from a window, where the evening light falls, how water moves across a site, which trees already grow there and how a new building settles into its surroundings can be just as important as what happens inside.
As Rachael puts it:
“A house doesn’t stop at the back door. The landscape around it is part of the same story. When architecture and landscape are considered together from the beginning, you can create somewhere that works better, feels more generous and belongs much more naturally in its setting.”
That doesn’t mean every client needs both services.
Architecture and landscape can be commissioned together or independently, and we regularly work alongside other architects and professional teams. Rachael, in particular, works with architectural practices to bring specialist landscape expertise into projects, helping schemes respond more sensitively to their setting, address environmental and biodiversity requirements and strengthen proposals through the planning process.
Designing for the way we live now
A great deal has changed in the past ten years, not least the way we use our homes.
Families increasingly want flexible spaces that can accommodate working from home, changing family life and better connections between indoors and out. Energy efficiency matters more. So does biodiversity. Existing buildings need to perform better and landscapes need to work harder for both people and nature.
At the same time, many of the places in which we work come with layers of history and constraint.
They may be listed, sit within conservation areas or protected landscapes, contain mature trees or important habitats, or simply occupy a place where any change needs to be particularly carefully considered.
For us, that complexity is often what makes a project interesting.
“The most interesting projects are often the complicated ones,” says Matthew. “You may be dealing with history, planning, ecology and landscape all at once, but you are also designing around the way a family actually wants to live. Our job is to bring those things together and help clients find a clear way forward.”
Sometimes that means adapting rather than replacing. Sometimes it is finding a new use for an old building, designing a sensitive extension, improving the performance of an existing home or exploring whether a more ambitious rural project has a realistic route through planning.
Good design begins with understanding what is already there.
Cotswold roots, wider horizons
The Cotswolds is home. Matthew and Rachael grew up here and Austin Design Works has always been rooted in Nailsworth and the surrounding landscape.
But our work is certainly not limited to it.
Over the past decade we have worked across the South West, Midlands and beyond. The landscape changes, the materials change and the planning context changes, but many of the questions remain remarkably similar: how do you create something new without losing what made a place distinctive in the first place?
Places cannot simply be frozen in time.
Homes need to evolve. Communities change. Buildings need new lives. Landscapes respond to a changing climate.
The challenge is to make that change considered and thoughtful.
Designing with a lighter footprint
Our tenth anniversary also gives us an opportunity to look at how the values behind the practice have developed.
Austin Design Works became a certified B Corporation in 2024, formalising our commitment to considering the social and environmental impact of the way we work.
We are also a RIBA Chartered Practice and have been included in the Regenerative Architecture Index, which recognises studios working towards buildings and landscapes that create a positive legacy for people, nature and long-term resilience.
Those ideas are not separate from design. Increasingly, they are design.
Perhaps one of the clearest examples came this summer when Rachael’s Ruskin Mill Trust Artisan Woodland Craft Garden won an RHS Gold Medal and Best Artisan Garden, as well as being Highly Commended for Environmental Innovation, at the inaugural RHS Badminton Flower Show.
The garden was created without concrete or plastics, instead using natural materials, traditional craft, planting and ecology to make something rooted firmly in its landscape.
And importantly, its story doesn’t finish with the flower show. The garden will be rebuilt at Grace Garden School in Bristol, where it will continue to be used and enjoyed.
The next ten years
Ten years gives you enough distance to look back, but it also makes you think about what comes next.
We remain interested in the same things that drew us to this work in the first place: interesting buildings, beautiful and useful landscapes, complicated sites, old places that need new ideas and clients who care about what they are creating.
We want to continue finding intelligent ways through planning, heritage and environmental challenges. To make existing buildings work harder rather than automatically replacing them. To create stronger connections between homes and landscapes. And to design places that feel as though they genuinely belong.
Most of all, we want to keep working with good people on interesting projects.
Thank you to every client, consultant, contractor, craftsman, collaborator and friend who has been part of the first ten years of Austin Design Works.
Here’s to the next ten, and to creating thoughtful places that work beautifully now and endure well into the future.
