Architecture practice in Portland, Maine
Most of it is already standing.
We design houses and conversions of existing buildings. What we start with is rarely an empty plot — more often a house someone inherited, bought or lived in all their life, and the question of how much of it should stay.
Why existing buildings
Demolishing a house and building new is rarely the cheaper answer, even where the bare construction figures suggest otherwise. The walls already standing hold material that has been produced, transported and installed once. Doing that work a second time has to be justified.
So every project begins with a survey of the existing building: measured on site, with plans and sections drawn from what is actually there rather than from the drawings held by the planning authority. Only then do we talk about design. In our experience the wish for extra floor area often shrinks once the existing layout is properly drawn and lying on the table.
We work with only a few clients at a time. That is a decision against full utilization and in favor of being able to stand on site during construction without an appointment.
- Practice founded
- 2011
- Staff, two of them part time
- 7
- Work stages under one roof
- 1 – 9
- Consultancies we work with permanently
- 3
From recent years
House T — 1954 subdivision house, story added and insulated, Deering Center, Portland
Bardwell barn — three apartments under the retained roof structure
Waterside house — new build on an infill plot, six apartments
Plan and section — the survey, drawn before the first design
Stable block, Gorham — a workshop becomes a house
Outlines instead of photographs: this demo shows a made-up business, so there are no real pictures of it. Your own website would show your own shots here.
Clients
We wanted an extension. After the second meeting there was a layout on the table with no extension in it — and we took that one.
There was never a week without word from them. Even when the word was: we are still waiting on the planning office.
A first conversation
An hour, at your place or ours, free of charge. Bring whatever drawings exist — even old photocopies help.
How Awelior would approach this project
Wheeler Kesteven Architects is invented — the way it is built is not. None of this is work delivered for a client. It is the shape we would give such a project — with the same depth, but without a client who would have to answer for it.
Where it starts
Wheeler Kesteven Architects work on housing and on existing buildings, across all nine work stages. Anyone commissioning them either has a plot or a house that should stay — and in both cases rarely knows what an architect actually does. So the site has to do two things at once: show work and explain scope.
Decisions
Projects on their own page, not as an endless gallery
The home page carries a selection; the full gallery sits one level down. That leaves room for the text about how the practice works — the first thing to disappear on a pure image page.
Work stages written out
“Work stages 1 to 9” tells a client nothing. So the services page sets them out as a sequence of steps, with expandable questions covering exactly the points that always come up in a first meeting.
A quiet archetype, but muted color
The same restrained archetype as the law firm, with a different palette and a motif built from plan, elevation and section. Two businesses share the attitude and part company in the imagery.
Deliberately left outNo named client quotes and no price range. A fee depends on construction cost and scope; a number on the website would either be wrong or so hedged that it says nothing.
What is in it
- Pages
- 5
- Content blocks
- 22
- Languages
- 4
Five pages, in all four languages. Navigation, the gallery with its enlarged view and the expandable questions all respond. Indicated only: every project image — schematic drawings stand in for photographs, because an invented practice has no real buildings.
How it would go on
Project pages instead of captions
Each project with its own page: brief, existing fabric, intervention, figures, photographer and clearance. That is the real scope of work for an architecture practice.
Image rights
Architectural photography is licensed. Using it means usage rights, credits, and an archive that still proves both a few years later.
Applications
The news list attracts graduates. Behind it belongs a route by which portfolios actually arrive, without a mailbox failing on a file size.
Something like this for your business?
This demo took a few days. Your real site gets your content, your brand and your inquiry flow.
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