About the practice
A practice built around the full life of a place.
Berkley is a multidisciplinary consultancy. We work across the full life of a place — from its cultural strategy and audience proposition to its architecture, its engineering, and the supervision of how it is built.
The proposition
Most cultural, civic, and heritage projects are assembled from a long chain of separate consultants: strategists, curators, architects, engineers, supervising consultants. Each handover loses something. Berkley is organised against that grain — strategy, design, and engineering sit in the same studio, under one project lead, from inception to handover.
Our soft disciplines — vision, audience, curation, brand — are not a recent bolt-on. They are central to how we read a brief. A museum project's design problem cannot be separated from its audience problem. A heritage district's master plan cannot be separated from how the place will be told.
The structure
We operate in three coordinated tiers:
- Strategy & Experience — cultural strategy, audiences, curation, brand and wayfinding.
- Design — architecture, heritage, master planning, interiors.
- Engineering & Delivery — structural, MEP, civil, sustainability, BIM, supervision, programme advisory.
Most commissions ask us to integrate two or three of these tiers. The cultural projects ask for all three.
How we work
Every commission begins with a positioning and feasibility phase, whether the brief is a museum, a heritage restoration, or a master plan. The deliverables vary by sector; the discipline does not.
We deliver design documentation to international standards (RIBA, AIA, FIDIC, ISO 19650). Our digital delivery is BIM-native — every project is modelled in coordination from concept through construction, with a clean handover model for facilities management.
Sectors
Our work spans six sectors. The most interesting commissions cross several.
- Cultural & Heritage
- Museums & Public Institutions
- Hospitality
- Residential
- Mixed-Use & Commercial
- Master Plans & Public Realm
What we will not do
- Take on a commission we cannot resource to international standard.
- Treat strategy as decoration on a finished design — or design as decoration on a finished strategy.
- Hand a project over to a third party for documentation or supervision unless the client asks for it.
- Use a building's heritage status as cover for not solving its real problems.
How to engage us
We respond to direct enquiry. Please write with a short brief, a location, an indication of scale, and any deadlines that matter. We reply within a week — and if we are at capacity, we say so honestly.