An Appointment with Change

We sat down with Katerina Dionysopoulou and Billy Mavropoulos at their brand new studio for Bureau De Change, the award-winning architecture and design practice they founded together in 2012. Their studio space alone tells you something about the nature of their practice before they do. Material samples on every surface, stone and ceramic swatches, mock-ups caught halfway between drawing and object. The work is alive and developing around you in the room. The table that we're sitting at, designed for furniture brand Efasma, reconfigures the relationship between chair and table and visually fuses them into one beautiful object. For anyone visiting their studio for the first time it is a fitting introduction to how they think. Their work is sensory, tactile, expressive and imaginative – a disruption to the predominantly glossy, slick interactions we have elsewhere. It feels like they enjoy the challenge of arresting people's attention with forms or textures that they might not expect to see in those environments.

Billy elaborates: "We've always been fascinated with trying to do things that make people look again. And kind of get them to slow down. We realised when we started that a lot of things were becoming bigger – the conversation was all about the mass and the quick construction – and we wanted to do something where the buildings were telling a story. Stories can be interpreted in different ways, and we've enjoyed hearing people talk about our buildings, and then we can explain where we came from, and then it makes a conversation happen. We want people to be able to explore, to be able to discover more the more you look at it – the second time you visit it, or when you turn that corner, or when it's rained."

Katerina and Billy pause when I ask if these narrative layers give their work a timeless quality: "I'm not sure if we're creating timeless architecture in the sense that we think our designs are timeless, but there is that weird sense that you can't really place them... what time they are from. They feel like they could have been there longer – of the past, but also the future."

This feeling, of being out of time and independent of the algorithm, is now being reflected in the nature of the clients that seek them out. "They say 'I don't want the average design. I don't want the design that is influenced by whatever everyone's saving on Pinterest right now'." Instead, BDC sets out a creative process that emphasises the importance of a deeper connection that involves a commitment to physical scale samples. That mutual belief in applied experimentation and the act of making leads to deeper and more meaningful relationships with their clients. "We're working on a project now where we're taking the client down to Portland to look at the stone in the quarries. We've walked around the city of London to look at how Portland stone has aged and how that creates different finishes. So, it's such a personal thing and our clients enjoy that. I think people will enjoy more and more the fact that something wasn't produced by the computer in a more generic manner. It's all about the physical connection."

This heightened and carefully curated creative relationship is clear to Katerina: "There is a tactility from early on, there are samples and fabricators as part of the conversation. We start putting it in our clients' minds that what we are going to design is going to be complicated, is going to be physical, is going to be big. And you're going to be part of that exercise."

Their recent work 'Echo', which formed part of a Thomas Heatherwick directed biennale, exemplifies all of these qualities at play. Deep research into the local historical vernacular of intricate timber structures led to a deeply textural cast concrete that achieves, from a distance, tones familiar as an architectural facade, yet up close the depth and repetition of the pattern becomes ever more striking and otherworldly.

In our conversation we questioned whether this more involved process is the reserve of an older and wealthier generation, but reassuringly Billy and Katerina acknowledge that their youngest client is potentially their most ambitious and adventurous. A hint, perhaps, of what is to come from a new generation of patrons looking for ever deeper and more original creative expressions with a textural depth designed to develop with time and interrogation.