The Architects’ Journal Architecture News & Buildings
vPPR’s work is distinguished by strong formalist geometries and uncompromising modernist forms, combined with subtle calibration of public/private thresholds and integration of landscape: ‘contextually sensitive and formally legible’, as they describe it.
The practice was founded by Catherine Pease and Jessica Reynolds – together with Tatiana von Preussen, who has just turned 40 –in 2009, having all met as students at Cambridge.
Pease went on to study at the Architectural Association and Reynolds at Princeton (von Preussen also went Stateside, to Columbia University, New York) and they still credit this educational mix with the interest in phenomenology and formalism that informs their work.
Source:Hélène Binet
View of kitchen, Ott’s Yard
Still unusual in being an all female-led practice, vPPR has over the past decade built up an impressive portfolio, beginning with a series of inventive houses, often occupying tight infill sites, such as Ott’s Yard and Vaulted House, where formal rigour is blended with skilful landscaping and gradation of shared space.
This rigour has continued on larger projects, such as the mixed-use Redchurch Street scheme of 2017 and, currently, an affordable housing scheme for Brick By Brick in Croydon and a new restaurant at Killua Castle in Ireland, both projects led by Pease.
A strong strand in their work is an interest in art, reflected in cultural projects that have included a string of major exhibition designs, led by Reynolds, as well as in the studios they run at Columbia and the AA, focused on artist housing and museum typologies respectively.
Milestones
2009 vPPR founded
2013 Completes Ott’s Yard, London, two eco-houses on an infill site
2014 Completes Vaulted House, London, a four-bedroom house on a leftover industrial plot
2016 Completes Redchurch Street, London, a mixed-use commercial and residential development
2020 Artists’ Residency, London, a conversion of a Grade II-listed historic building, and Killua Garden Restaurant, County Westmeath, Ireland, in an historic walled garden are ongoing projects
vPPR trio named Emerging Woman Architect of the Year 2015
Building study: Vaulted House by vPPR Architects
vPPR completes café inside countryside department store
AJ 40 under 40 in association with
