Portrait
Helena Atlas
Founding Director · RIBA
A practice — established 2016
We're an eight-person studio working on residential, small civic, and adaptive-reuse projects across the Midlands. We take on six to eight commissions a year. We don't publish work we aren't proud of, which means there are years on this site you won't find on most other practice websites.
Awarded:
Selected work — 2022–24
View all 47 projects →A four-bay rural addition to a Grade II farmhouse.
Community pavilion for a deconsecrated churchyard.
Three small terraced houses, infill on a former works.
A reading room and reference library, slotted into a 1960s envelope.
Practice
We work slowly, and we don't take commissions where the brief is to add square footage and nothing else. The practice was set up to spend more time on fewer things.
Founded
2016, Stafford
Team
Eight, plus two visiting
Projects / year
Six to eight
The people
Eight in the studio, plus two visiting tutors who come up from London on Thursdays.
Founding Director · RIBA
Founding Director · ARB
Associate · Architectural
Senior · Conservation
Approach
Atlas & Pine was set up in 2016 with a deliberate cap: six to eight commissions a year, no exceptions. The cap is the practice. It's why we can turn down briefs that are square-footage exercises, why we can spend twelve weeks on a single window detail, and why every project ships with the directors still on the file.
We've never billed by the hour. Every project is fixed-fee against a defined scope, agreed before a single drawing leaves the studio. We don't carry contingency lines — if we got the scope wrong, that's our problem, not yours.
We work mostly with private clients on residential and small civic projects. Adaptive reuse is the bulk of the practice: rebuilding things rather than replacing them. We think that's where most of the next decade's architecture has to happen.
Brief in
Fortnight one
Concept out
Week six
Planning
Months 4–7
On site
As you need
In the press