I have worked with KKS, now Savills Workplace & Design, for long enough now that the work and the people have become inseparable in my mind. Not, you understand, in a sentimental way, and not because every project has been easy. Perhaps the opposite. You learn most about people by watching how they behave under pressure: late in the day, short of time, when the project is resisting, when the team is tired and still trying to do the right thing.
That is where I have come to understand them.
What has always marked them out, through our time together, is not the language of workplace consultancy, or the reassuring machinery of a large firm. It is something much rarer, and much harder to fake: an authenticity of care. Care for the people who will one day occupy the places they make.
As a photographer, I usually arrive near the end, when the noise has died down and the rooms are expected to speak for everyone. The drawings have become reality. I am there with the camera, but what I am really looking for is evidence: of attention, of judgement, of the human chemistry that made the place possible.
Some spaces give you nothing except surfaces. Others still contain the life that made them. With KKS, I have often felt that life in the room: the impatience to solve, the stubbornness, the jokes, the nerves, the pride, the fatigue, the hope. The strange, visceral charge of people trying to make something better than it needed to be.
That is why the relationship has mattered to me. I have been privileged to stand close to a creative team that behaves less like a service provider and more like a family of minds, different, challenging, generous, exacting, loyal.
People who understand that workplace design is not really about desks or finishes or brand language. It is about the conditions of other people’s days. How they arrive. How they recover. How they concentrate. How they feel seen. How a business might become a little more honest, a little more humane, because someone took the trouble to care.
The longer I photograph architecture, the less interested I am in buildings as objects. I am interested in what they are consequences of: thought, nerve, patience, compromise, affection, discipline, and the stupid necessary hope that a place can make life, well, just better. KKS has given me that, again and again. Not perfection. Something more useful. Places that seem to care, to want to nurture.
And so, after all these years, I do not think of them simply as a client. I think of them as people who have allowed me to witness a journey, to share in its atmosphere, and to make photographs from inside a trust that has been built slowly. Minds, hands, nerves, hearts. The real human work. Care and thoughtfulness, intelligence and experience, diligence and compassion, all hidden inside the apparently ordinary act of making places for other people.
