Commercial Clients (Residential Clients click here)

It is for good reason that companies invest heavily in their corporate identity, branding, web design and the like. It is clearly vital in a highly competitive environment to put your best foot forward, to explain clearly what services you provide and present them in an attractive fashion that in itself encapsulates the company’s personality and ethos.

However, it never ceases to amaze us at Ampersand how few companies properly follow this through by taking the same care about their physical appearance. We are frequently taken aback when visiting commercial clients just how often there is a complete dislocation between the message being sent out by way of websites or brochures and what greets you when you step across the reception or boardroom threshold. It’s a little like sending out a fabulous job application only to turn up to the interview in a t-shirt and jeans (assuming that the interview isn’t for a brand management company in which case t-shirt and jeans is probably de rigueur!). It is not so much that there is a lack of care about the environment – though that can be the case – than that it jars with the company’s own perception of what it represents and the image it wishes to project.

Hence our Interior Audit service. Our view is that a truly cohesive image should integrate all these aspects including interiors. Our dedicated service includes an initial on-site appraisal followed by a comprehensive presentation. Depending on the nature of the project this may include spatial planning; colour schemes; furniture specification; in fact any relevant aspect of commercial interior design. Plans, illustrations, specifications and design boards are provided. Where appropriate we are happy to co-ordinate with appointed marketing teams or to introduce our own expert design associates in specialist areas such as graphic design and website development.

This dedicated service is available at £750 + VAT – get in touch to find out more or to make an appointment.

Residential Clients

Does your living room not quite work but you don’t know why? Are you struggling to inject atmosphere into your dining room? Does your lighting give you “industrial kitchen” when you want “romantic bistro”?

You may be nervously feeling your way towards a re-design of your home or simply looking for the magic ingredient that will pull all the existing elements together. Either way our trained eye can help you to identify exactly what the problem is and to provide a solution.

For a fee of £500 + VAT we will visit you in your home, put together a detailed design board with comprehensive suggestions for a scheme that will work for you, and present you with the suggested resolutions. What’s more, if you engage us to carry out the work we will offset this fee against our final design fee on invoicing for the products and services purchased.

Contact us to make an appointment or to find out more.

We mean it when we talk about spending time getting to know a new client – not just to ensure we are compatible and ‘in tune’, but to find out what makes you tick, what your life is like, how you live it. It is only by investing this time that we believe it is possible to design for you as opposed to imposing some sort of ‘signature style’ template on all and sundry.

We aim to design a scheme that will work with and reflect your collections, your belongings, the accumulated memories of your life. As this blog from Harry Mount says, “Much of a natural education is acquired by casual absorption from your surroundings” – and for natural education we would also read happiness!

• The Telegraph: You learn more in old, beautiful rooms

Following my blog about Seafield House I am delighted to report that John Addison’s robust campaigning appears to have borne some fruit. He has been asked to be involved in seeing how the rescue efforts for Sir William Arrol’s home can be consolidated. Fingers crossed.

The default position of many councils may be to ‘conserve to death’ and then roll in the bulldozers but at least it seems that informed agitation can still make a difference.

At a time of much politicised flag-waving and ersatz heritage it is very sad to see the proposed demolition of the Ayrshire home of Sir William Arrol, one of Scotland’s greatest engineers and designer of the Tay Bridge, Forth Bridge and London’s Tower Bridge. Arrol personified Victorian drive and innovation: born in poverty and apprenticed to a blacksmith he became a world-renowned engineer, served as an MP and, on his death, his home was gifted to the British Red Cross – they don’t make them like that any more.

Surely the demolition of Seafield House would  be a damning indictment of Scottish conservation as well as presenting the nation in a rather superficial light - dislocated from its past and indifferent to the virtues that once combined to create a very particular Scottish greatness.

Some of you will know John Addison who has worked alongside us in an engineering capacity on some of our larger projects. For those of you who don’t, he is a building conservation specialist, one of the co-authors of the Edinburgh New Town Conservation Handbook and holder of refreshingly robust opinions on what is going wrong within many Council departments. He is helping to raise awareness of the campaign for Seafield House’s survival and when we spoke he saw this as just the latest in a line of bureaucratic failures that are representative of wider conservation issues: “The double standards shown by Councils is breathtaking and deeply worrying. They preach ‘best practice’ and government standards to us all, yet they enforce from trivia, bully private businesses, destroy buildings and breach those Codes and Standards which are important to people in daily life. Just look at the mess Edinburgh Council has created with the trams fiasco and the massive abuses of property and human rights associated with its ongoing Property Repairs Scam. I helped the BBC make its TV documentary and was horrified at the evidence of how a once logical maintenance-watch system descended into technical and management chaos. This wilderness must have opened up the road for the corruption reported in the press.”

Find out more about Seafield House at www.heraldscotland.com/mobile/news/home-news/council-to-debate-fate-of-scots-engineers-home.16744756

Photograph of Seafield House courtesy of Hugh Dougherty.

We had an inspiring time at the Cadell exhibition at The National Gallery of Modern Art Two (the rather pointlessly – and no doubt expensively – renamed Dean Gallery).

Kicking off a series on the Scottish Colourists this is, amazingly, the first solo exhibition of the Edinburgh-born Cadell’s work to be held in a public gallery for 70 years. His still lifes and portraits are well covered, as are the beautifully natural paintings of Iona. But we particularly enjoyed the striking interiors that Cadell painted in his Edinburgh studios. Cadell clearly took great care with his surroundings and the familiar Georgian proportions of the rooms are enlivened by his bold use of colour (see The Orange Blind and The Gold Chair). The effect is as arresting now as it must have been at the time. They certainly show Edinburgh in a glamorous light.

The exhibition is on until 18^th March and it is definitely something to make time for.

• See: www.nationalgalleries.org

Wishing you a happy and prosperous 2010, from the Ampersand team.