In our new series ‘Modern Masters’, we’re meeting with some of our favourite architects, designers and makers to profile their practice and get their unique insights on architecture, interiors and design inspiration.

Earlier today we caught up with Conran and Partners’ Senior Partner, Tim Bowder-Ridger, to discuss the influential practice and his passion for residential projects.

Tim Bowder-Ridger: “Conran and Partners has a really interesting history. Terence Conran was our founder and about 30 years ago he partnered up with Fred Roche to form Conran Roche. Margaret Thatcher was privatising all of the architectural departments and Roche and his team came out of Milton Keynes planning department and created the new practice with Terence. Roche was doing very large town planning schemes while Terence was driving ahead with his restaurants and interior design. It culminated in the development of Butler’s Wharf which set the tone of an ambition to create rounded places to live – effectively establishing Conran and Partners.

“Terence’s heritage with Habitat in the 1960s and his reinvention of the way restaurants were manifested in the UK in the 1980s/90s were major leaps in the design world. Terence’s and Conran and Partner’s ethos has always been about trying to imagine how we can make lives better. Sometimes that’s about doing small things, sometimes it’s big things. Nowadays we’re doing some very large-scale projects that include private developments like Centre Point and Blake Tower as well as working with councils like Southwark to develop social housing – but we work right across the range. Conran and Partners passionately believe in improving people’s lives and using our skills to do that.

“I joined as a project architect in 1997 so I’m actually coming up to my 20^th anniversary with the practice – but what I’ve seen over that 20-year period is how our strength in residential and hospitality has evolved. People’s expectations of their homes and what they experience in hotels has crossed over enormously, and the boundaries in people’s lives have blurred. People’s lives are a lot less segregated than they were for my parents’ generation. For my parents, there was a work life and a home life, now the overlaps are much greater and the edges are much greyer – it’s an exciting time and we’re really recognising it in our designs for the Boundary and Centre Point.

“The thing that fascinates me about residential projects is the gravitas – nothing can be more fundamental to an architect than designing places where people live. Our job is to take that basic requirement and turn it into something of joy that people love and take ownership of.

“We were the architects on Cabanel Place or ‘Baylis Old School’, and with that we really wanted to retain the essence of the original buildings. The newer buildings make the retained buildings even more heroic in their look and feel, and the residents that live there have really taken ownership of that. It’s a really successful project.

“One of the reasons that large scale residential projects failed in the 1950s and 1960s was because they were imposed – people didn’t have a chance to take ownership and the way that it was handled in terms of breaking up communities was disastrous. With our Green Man Lane estate in Ealing, we invested a lot of time consulting the original residents to make sure it felt like their design when they moved back into the new scheme. With the Barbican, that has remained successful because of its rounded community and the cultural base to the scheme that gives it a sense of place and a sense of purpose. We want to create that feeling in every residential scheme we do.

“I also think it’s absolutely vital for people to be able to make their home their own. Some people fill them up with books…my house is jam-packed with stuff – myself and my wife collect everything which is disastrous for a small house! But that’s what people’s personalities do, they show themselves in their homes. If you look at Basil Spence’s old residential drawings, he deliberately drew them with different types of furniture to show how they would feel with different things inside.

“People look to us because of our sense of the end user, we design for how people use a building. It’s about more than the commerciality of residential buildings, they have to be things that will stand the test of time. Long before people were talking about lifetime homes, our approach was to engage people when they were young and hope that they would stay forever. There are quite a lot of apartments in Butler’s Wharf that haven’t fundamentally changed from the original designs in the early ‘90s and that’s a credit to our approach to design.

“The thing that excites me most about architecture and design at the moment is that the boundaries are being blurred. The beauty of the digital age and the influence of the millennials that we’re now starting to design for is that they’re more informed, and that makes our world much, much richer – and it makes the questions that we ask as architects more complex. I think that’s where architects are starting to regain their position of being able to add value in the industry. Terence is in his 80s now and he’s terribly excited about it.

“The other thing is that we have a new generation of architects and designers which are really exciting, and significantly the clients are maturing fast and becoming much more sophisticated – it’s a lot less about bling and a lot more about culture, that’s where the shift is.”

See more on our Directory of Architects and Designers.