Threshold

Wren

A bookstore is not a shop. It is a room people choose to be in — somewhere between a library and a discovery, where a debut novel sits beside a bestseller and neither apologises for the company. Wren was designed around that idea. The architecture follows the books.

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The Canopy

A house that opens to the outside is not a house with large windows. It is a different proposition entirely — one where the boundary between inside and out is not a glass wall to be admired but a threshold to be crossed, repeatedly, without thinking about it.

The clients were a family of four who had spent years living in houses that kept the garden at arm's length — framed, visible, appreciated from a distance. What they wanted was simpler and harder to build than it sounds: a home where the outside was genuinely present inside, where the canopy of the trees above was as much a part of the house as the roof, and where the question of whether you were in or out had no obvious answer.

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Longhouse

A studio is not measured by its square footage. It is measured by what it makes possible — the quality of concentration it allows, the ease of collaboration it encourages, the feeling, at the end of a long day, that the room was working with you. Cline & Co needed a space that matched the standard of the work produced inside it.

The building is a Victorian printworks in Hackney Wick, built in 1887 and used continuously for light industrial work until 2019. When the client — a painter who had been renting studio space across four different buildings for eleven years — first saw it, the roof was partially open to the sky and the floor was covered in decades of press ink and aggregate. The arched brick end wall and the pine floor beneath the debris were intact. The steel trusses, original to the building, were sound.

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The Flat

The hardest brief Ana Tanaka has ever had was her own.

She had been looking for two years before she found it. First-floor flat in a Victorian conversion in Hackney, east-facing bedroom, sash windows throughout, a cornice that someone had painted over four times but never removed.

The kitchen faced north and had been fitted in the mid-nineties by someone who had not thought carefully about what a kitchen was for. The living room had been divided at some point — a partition wall, since removed, that had left the room with two doors and no clear sense of itself.

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About Us

Threshold is a practice built on a simple conviction: that the spaces people inhabit determine the quality of the lives they live inside them. We work across homes, studios, and workplaces, with clients who come to us through people we have already worked with. That is how we prefer to work.

There are three of us who founded the practice, and five lead architects. Not a number we grew into — one we chose. It is the size at which we can still know every project and every client by name, and at which one of the founders stays involved in every commission, from the first conversation to the final handover.

Our work spans new build and retrofit, the domestic and the working, the quiet and the public-facing. What it shares is an approach: we listen before we draw, we question before we resolve, and we never mistake a finished building for a finished thought.

The clients who find us have usually been thinking about their project for longer than they expected. They arrive knowing what they want to feel, if not yet how to build it. That is exactly the right place to begin.

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