Coffey Architects

Profile

Founded in 2005, Coffey Architects has built a reputation as an ingenious and ambitious architecture practice. Bold yet sensitive, the unique qualities of the practice’s work are manifest in projects across all scales: intimate domestic refurbishments, welcoming public buildings, and grand master-planning schemes.

Things have developed a lot since Phil Coffey set up on his own in a small office in Highbury in 2005. We are a team of twenty talented and dedicated professionals sharing a culture of excellence. We have grown a reputation for highly crafted residential and public projects over the past decade. The practice is now showing its ability to deliver larger more complex schemes including the recently completed 400,000 sqft Cloister workplace scheme in Qingdao, China. Our projects have been recognised with a number of awards including 2012 Young Architect of the Year and Small Project Architect of the Year, 2011 RIBA Stephen Lawrence Prize and AJ Retrofit awards in 2014 and 2015. Lately we have also been shortlisted for Interior and Office Architects of the Year 2016 and a 2016 BCO Award against a strong group of practices that shows our growing reputation for design and delivery.

Coffey Architects have delivered cultural projects for internationally renowned institutions including the British Film Institute and Science Museum Group. The projects completed and currently under way in the office show that Coffey Architects are now a practice that can deliver crafted, beautiful projects at all scales to tight design and construction deadlines, offering value through considered strategic and intelligent thinking.

People, Context & Light
People, Context and Light are our main considerations when it comes to creating architecture. We don’t believe architecture is about a certain style, but rather its adaptability and response to the context, its social life, the people using it and the light defining it.

We aim to create social interaction through all our projects and find elegant, contemporary answers to creative and pragmatic issues that are brought together in architecture’s greatest resource: light. Regardless of scale we care about the elements that create the physical conditions for people’s lives and their social interaction.

We believe in an inclusive approach; with environmental, social and economic issues integrated within the process. We consider architecture to be a process of collaboration where we feel it is important to involve selected experts and consultants, across professional fields, in every stage of the design process.

Biography

Phil Coffey (Founder)
Phil Coffey set up Coffey Architects in 2005 to pursue his passion for architecture, light, people and place.

Prior to setting up his own practice Phil Coffey worked with Ian Ritchie Architects. He worked for seven years on arts projects, helping to design and deliver the Plymouth Theatre Royal production centre and the Spire of Dublin, both shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2003/2004 respectively. He also worked for Avery Associates on the award winning IMAX cinema, Waterloo, London.

Over the past 15 years Phil Coffey has undertaken a photographic project named ‘Outside’ to inform the work of Coffey Architects. The project documents the cultures and landscapes of our planet. Combining a love for travel, photography and culture, the photo graphs reinforce our belief that architecture is fundamentally about empathy and context; how we feel and embed ourselves into the places we live, work and play.

Since Coffey Architects were formed Phil Coffey has been included in some of the most prestigious exhibitions within the architectural profession including the Faces of British Architecture Exhibition 2011 and the Architects Journal 40 under 40 awards in 2005. The tenth anniversary of Coffey Architects was celebrated with the ‘Exposure’ exhibition at the RIBA London. The exhibition and accompanying book captures and embodies our preoccupations in architecture for the experiential qualities of how a place feels, how it connects to the light and elements outside, how it performs as a space for social interactions and how it respects its wider ecological context.


Phil Coffey has been invited to speak at the RIBA Headquarters, The Royal Academy, Grand Designs Live, The Surface Design Show a well as numerous universities to talk about the work of Coffey Architects. Phil has also been a judge for the Stephen Lawrence Prize 2012 and 2013, Grand Designs Awards 2012 and 2013 amongst other jury activities. Phil enjoys teaching and has been a part time tutor to degree and diploma students at the Welsh School of Architecture since 2005, he has also been an invited critic at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.

Coffey Architects have won many nationally acclaimed awards including a number of RIBA awards, the Stephen Lawrence Prize 2011, Small Project Architect of the Year 2012 and Young Architect of the Year 2012, Retrofit Awards 2014 and 2015 as well as being shortlisted for Interior and Office Architects of the Year 2016 and a 2016 BCO Award against a strong group of practices that shows our growing reputation for design and delivery. In 2016 we also won RIBA Awards for Modern Mews as well as Modern Side Extension.