For People and For Place: Form and Feeling with Alex Richards

September 28, 2025

It's one of the last true days of summer, and where better to spend it than in the rolling hills of the Kent Downs? We’ve travelled out to the countryside to meet Alex Richards of Hollaway Studio, architect by day, farmer by early morning. We're sat in Guy Hollaway's kitchen, a contemporary cottage designed by Hollaway Studio, after spending the morning "moseying around the farm" and getting to meet Alex's family, sheep Fibonacci, Brumus, and Sophie, pony Merlin, and Chilli, the farm cat. Alex has been showing us the site where his own family home will be, built by himself and aiming to be the UK's first house and farm to feature a fully off-grid hydrogen fuelled energy centre. "The opportunity to design and deliver your own family home is every architect's dream," he enthuses, gesturing at Guy's modernist kitchen; "and, to marry the farming and the architecture."

Much like the home he is building — where the garden "blends into the landscape", and the melding of architecture and meadow ensures you "can't tell where the house starts and stops" — for Alex, it is impossible to tell where the architectural work begins and the farming ends: "merging me, the farmer, with me, the architect!" Farming, for Alex, is grounding — "not in the muddy fingernail sense!" — instead, it is the "working of the land for the betterment of the environment and those who live in it." A beautiful wild landscape, Alex reminds us, "doesn't stay beautiful on its own," with a careful sensitivity to the symbiosis between animal and land required at every turn. With practices such as rewilding, Alex the farmer picks up where Alex the architect has left off: "It's a lifestyle, I never shut a gate and walk away." Each an intervention into the other's landscape, both architecture and farming are callings guided by seasonality and light, weather and time, and "really being a part of the seasons." The farm and its scenery, Alex explains, is his main source of inspiration, although St Paul's was an early moment of discovering the humbling awe of architecture, and Chatsworth House is still a mainstay in the imagination, for "the way it commands and is commanded by the landscape."

This philosophy guides Alex, and Hollaway Studio, where he is managing partner alongside founder, Guy Hollaway. After "stumbling into architecture," Alex found a natural affinity for the practice: "It was the first time in my life where I realised there was something to get out of bed for." He was, he says, modestly, very lucky to discover a career, "I guess in some ways it found me!" He smiles, "it's quite humbling, there is nothing else I could do even if I wanted to… but I seem to be okay at doing the architecture." After a decade at the studio, Alex and his team today seek to design architecture that "responds to the landscape, and isn't an apology." Bravery, Alex notes, is crucial: a big landscape requires a big intervention. "It's not aggressive or overpowering, more complementary, something that can standup in the same context." From materiality, to light, to weather, no detail is spared; "In the same way that landscape gets better over time, how do we make sure that a building is going to look better in ten, fifteen, twenty… a hundred years time?"

Perhaps surprisingly, Alex suggests, the permanence of a building relies upon its ability to transform over time, improving with age and responding to not only the landscape outside, but the people who reside within it. From considering the prevailing winds on Dungeness Beach, to the rose gardens surrounding a concert hall, to how the sun could hit a teacher's board, "it’s about the way we live." What we want now might not be what we want in five years time, and "good architecture is a reflection of your understanding of the client and the site… The architect moulds the two together, in a way that makes them both sing."

It is bringing together contradictions and "making them sing" that is, for Alex, at the heart of architectural design. "Architecture has the necessity to be mathematical and precise, yet creative and free." Negotiation and navigation guide this process, the rigour coming from "knowing that when you're designing those beautiful concepts, they fundamentally need to be delivered." After listing the many considerations taken when designing and building — from timber to funding, warranties to planning — Alex grins, "it's difficult, but rewarding!" Aligning the mathematic with the "beautiful concept" devised at the outset, for Alex, is never a constraint, instead offering exciting potential for "a greater architectural resolution, a fundamental understanding how to make the most out of a site."

Hollaway Studios' recent project, The Glasshouse, is a stunning example of such contradictions; "at one end of the spectrum was an elegant and beautiful temporary piece, at Chelsea Flower Show for a week, and then at the other end, was the robust, timeless piece that effectively becomes a public building." A "wonderful opportunity to bring those two things together," The Glasshouse, a pavilion inspired by the ornate, horticultural designs of the Victorians, spent the week at Chelsea Flower Show, and later relocated to HMP Downview, where it has become a permanent space for horticultural training and rehabilitation. Alex and the Hollaway Studios team "pushed the design boundaries," bringing their work into new contexts where it had not been seen before, becoming a hallmark of the Studios' ethos: "It comes back to the reason that we do architecture, and do buildings like this, to fundamentally see if we can help people, and change their lives." After winning gold at Chelsea Flower Show, The Glasshouse now stands at its permanent home, offering an opportunity for the women to learn new skills for future employment and, "a quiet space they wouldn't otherwise get." Facilitated entirely by architecture, and a brief that emphasised both the beautiful and the practical, it was, to Alex, "a wonderful thing, that really shows what architecture can be."

The Glasshouse, for Alex, is yet another example of how architecture can be life changing. "It's not about imposing your architecture on a site or a client or a brief, it's about one facilitating the other, with the building following a feeling that is fundamentally rooted in place." Whether it’s a cinema or a skatepark, or a house or a school, "people interact with those buildings. And if you make that building as good as it can be and make their experience as good as it can be, there's something in that." Every Hollaway building, he explains, is done "for people and for place." Showing us photos of F-51, a multistorey skatepark completed in 2022, he explains how the finished park brought together Olympians and professionals alike, along with local children and families: "it gave young people a home that celebrates them and said they were important… And suddenly it was just this massive leveller." It's amazing, Alex tells us, that a building facilitated that moment — "and to embed that in a sports community, with arts folded around it, and to celebrate people… It's amazing that architecture has that power."

"Form follows feeling" is a phrase often spoken at the studio, Alex laughs, but there's a sincerity to it — "feeling and context are so important." His family home, he hopes, will be passed down the generations, "and they'll have this amazing piece of architecture that sits quietly in the landscape, but will be there forever." The form of it, and the function too, will be important, "and people will come in and say 'wow, this is amazing!'" He smiles: "but not because of how it looks, but because of how it feels." After meeting Alex, and Fibonacci and Brumus, Sophie and Merlin, and Chilli the cat, we've got a good feeling about what he and Hollaway Studios will do next.

You can learn more about Alex and Hollaway Studios work on their website, https://www.hollawaystudio.co.uk, and on their Instagram, @hollawaystudio.