Posts in Category: Family
My Partners – November 2016
My business partner Ben Derbyshire is to be the next President of the RIBA. That’s quite an honour so the partners went out for a quiet dinner to celebrate.
The next day: November board. Back to the business of running a business.
People deserve better places to live, so we’ve made an organisation that tries to combine to skills to deliver this: architects, graphic designers, planners, landscape architects, cooks and others.
We don’t have all the pieces yet, but we are moving in the right direction.
Back home: the life partners: J,F, I & I. Watching Strictly.
I lost this sketch book so here’s a design idea for someone else’s house drawn at a relaxed summer barbecue.
And some summer tennis.
Vehicles & holidays – 12 October 2016
Waiting in China Town and sketching delivery bikes. You can’t finish them because they keep racing off at the standard speed for ‘L’ plate food deliveries: flat out.
Faster: a turntable ladder at Crewe Toll fire station. This is the highlight of Fraser’s trip with the Beavers.
I’m here because he’s been a bit ill, so I’m checking he’s alright.
They do an entertaining routine, the fireman. “Kids, the more yellow helmets at a fire, the more chance everyone gets out alive. The more white helmets, the more chance it all burns to the ground”. The bosses wear the white helmets.
On the tube, absentmindedly sketching the guy who happens to be opposite when I realise he’s wrapped his hands in a scarf so I can’t see his big tattoos. Didn’t mean to make it awkward, wish I knew what they said.
Back in Edinburgh we are moving office. I find myself in kids soft play parties looking at how they’ve done the services install. Time for a break.
On the Windermere ferry sketching a Mazda MX5 and a Renault. Imagining (well copying) Donald Campbell’s celebrated K7. We went and had a look at Coniston Water where Campbell was killed on 4th January ’67 in an attempt to break his own world water speed record.
The holiday had begun in Borrowdale Youth Hostel. I love youth hostels: we all get in one room, the foods good, the people are friendly and the prices and locations are great. Citizen Rambler.
Next stop, Center Parcs. It shows how you can make the world around you much nicer just by replacing cars with bikes. Everyone seems to go for it.
The boys on the tablet, though most of the action was in the ‘subtropical swimming paradise’. 
This is the ‘hut’. J & I got ill here. Being ill at Center Parcs is about as expensive as checking in to a BUPA hospital, so we didn’t make a big deal of it.
Second Home – 20 August 2016
This is Second Home, in my second home.
It describes it’s self as a ‘carefully curated community’, and a ‘creative accelerator’. It’s certainly an interesting environment to do some sketching in.
A leaving do for Andrew, Massimo and Cheng, all returning to further their education. This is Massimo’s third leaving do. I pretend to be upset but I’m mostly glad they want to come back.
“Any story told long enough becomes a tragedy” said Alice Fraser at the start of her emotional ‘comedy’ The Resistance.
Back home, we’ve been sharing with a cat.
Isla drawing a (mechanical) dog.
Staycation – 3 August 2016
One of my ancestors used to work in Stockbridge Market (1823 – 1906). It’s a very attractive little part of a very attractive place. I’m here with our sketchclub looking at how buildings hit the ground. This ground floor is related to the upper floors, but not the same.
This isn’t related at all.
Staycation:
gardening,
films,
new school haircuts.
And eating out. Innes got so bored waiting in Zizzi’s for a pizza that I let him draw in the sketchbook. “I’ll draw Lewis Hamilton”, he promised.
“Dad, it was going to be Lewis Hamilton but instead it’s a sheep.”
Sommer Hus – July 2016
In Kulhuse, near Copenhagen, for a summerhouse party in Allan & Elgi’s garden.
Fraser’s on the swing, that’s the sail from Allan’s old boat keeping the sun off some times, the rain off other times. Great Day meeting the Danes.
It’s a relaxed place to be: many thanks to our hosts.
The kids sleeping in the car on the way there.
We spent most of the week in Allan & Elgi’s Copenhagen flat. This is Fraser and I out on the balcony talking about sharks. The most cycle friendly city.
Day trip to Malmo to see Henrik and Jaana. It’s always interesting to catch up with people when we are on holiday and they aren’t. I like see what normal life is like in different places, as opposed to tourist life.
Isla’s detailed sketch of Innes on the flight home.
Just before we left: sitting outside a bar in Kings Cross watching people watching England lose to Iceland.
Not long after we got back: looking at Bankside’s latest landmark with HTA Sketch Club.
Restart – 20 April 2016
I’ve fallen out of the habit of keeping the sketch diary up to date, the online version anyway. I’ve kept the sketch books just the same but painting the six portraits I did recently used up all my spare time. Then I cycled across France.
I had an idea that I’d go back and colour up the old sketches and up load them all here: do a catch up blog. But of course I won’t. The thing about a diary is that the keeper is only interested in recording today, not writing up the past.
So here are the sketches from the current book.
There’s another sketch book that’s almost entirely missing.
So getting back up to date there’s lot’s about HTA, which is about right. This includes celebration dinners…
… and fascinating presentations: this one by Lara Feigel on her book ‘The Bitter Taste of Victory’…
…and this one on Women in Architecture and women in HTA. In the non architectural areas of our business: planning, graphics, sustainability and landscape design the genders are balanced throughout the grades. In architecture they aren’t. Something to sort.
Christmas 2015
In reverse:
The last event of the break, my dad’s 88th birthday.
New years day, a brass band in the livingroom.
Andreas
Angus visited from France.
Catching up with old school pals in Dunfermline. The same as we were, a little more tired but a little better at communication.
Innes hid behind the sofa for the Queen’s speech.
Fun box was fun.
The only person on a plane to London City the week before Christmas.
Actually these are the things I did in between riding the bike and painting portraits, in preparation for cycling from London to Cannes in March. I’ll show you the portraits next time.
Training at HTA – 17 December 2015
Over the last year, we’ve had Mike Hopkins coming in to train our management team in a few useful techniques. We’re a business run by designers so it’s good to hear how the professionals do it. Contrary to popular perception (big egos/ sensitive souls) designers don’t really need to be treated all that carefully but they are good at questioning the conventional route. Mike has a straightforward style, telling our creative team what he thinks, and this is going down well.
Getting a great guided tour around the first bespoke build-to-rent building in the UK, for be:here.
Fraser and Isla have expertise too. Here they are showing two year old Ellan some advanced present unwrapping skills.
A man in a stripy jersey watching his kid at swimming lessons.
Julie watching the tennis and working out how we’ll get the boiler fixed. We moved into a house in the winter and the boiler burst. It now appears this happens to pretty much everyone.
Maybe the 25% of the population who’d consider buying a new house have got it right?
A few things to learn – 29 November 2015
Fraser is learning to play tennis. I drew Isla watching him, then she drew him, and titled it.
At an office CPD, on lighting. Not a bad one. 
You learn more, obviously, from seeing the things skilled designers (and their visionary clients) have actually built than you do from watching Powerpoint.
Edinburgh has an extensive stock of ageing bungalows with big back gardens and they’re gradually being bought up by young families. A roster of talented local architects can transform them by taking a bit of back garden and building the kind of bright and open living space people are after these days. Few are as lofty and light as friends Asa & Daniel’s one, by David Blaikie.
Innes (and me), learning to be gardeners.
Denis Mason-Jones – 19 November 2015
Thursday: an enjoyable evening looking at the sketches entered in the Denis Mason-Jones sketching competition, in Leeds.
I met Denis’s son and picked the winner.
Tuesday: speaking at the Residential Investment Conference 2015. It was held underground, and the lecture theatre style benches glowed red. I tried not to be too distracted.
Monday night: watching ideas for getting one million more homes into the outer London boroughs, Pecha Kucha style at the NLA.
Saturday: more relaxed time spent in Edinburgh.
The kids playing sport.
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