Grow Places

GP 37: Where Two Things Meet Something Else Happens: with Tom & James Teatum of Noiascape

• Grow Places • Season 1 • Episode 37

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Welcome to the Grow Places Podcast, where we explore the virtuous circle of people, growth, and place. Hosted by our founder, Tom Larsson, this episode takes a deep dive into architecture, development, and urban living with Tom & James Teatum, co-founders of Noiascape.

Noiascape is redefining the way we think about housing, blurring the boundaries between living, working, and social space. The brothers share their journey from architectural practice to development and operations, explaining why fragmentation in the built environment limits innovation and how their integrated approach allows them to create places that truly shape experiences.

We explore:
🔹 How Noiascape challenges conventional housing models with a focus on experience and community
🔹 The role of design, development, and operations in shaping better living spaces
🔹 Why listening to residents and local communities is key to creating places that thrive
🔹 How cities can foster cultural identity and social interaction through smart spatial design
🔹 The future of urban living and how Noiascape plans to scale its model across multiple cities

With a passion for connecting people and place, Tom & James explain why great cities are made in the spaces between private and public life—and how they are building for sustainable, meaningful urban experiences.

Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation about the future of housing, the power of design, and why great places are never created in isolation.

🎧 Listen now and join the conversation.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Grow Places podcast, where we explore the virtuous circle of people, growth and place Brought to you by Grow Places and hosted by our founder, tom Larson.

Speaker 2:

Tom James, thank you very much for joining us today. This is a first for us where we've got two guests and also brothers as well, so I'm really looking forward to the conversation and diving into everything you're doing at Noise two guests and also brothers as well. So, um, really looking forward to the conversation and diving into everything you're doing at noise scape and also your journey to that. So, um, just before we dive in, why don't you give an introduction to yourselves? Uh, be great if you can do it kind of individually as well as kind of collectively I'm james um, brother of tom.

Speaker 3:

uh, worked with tom for probably over 12, 15 years now, studied architecture, went to work with Tom in private practice that Tom had set up originally, and through the course of that time we sort of moved into development and we'll probably go on to speak about what that is. But yeah, that's sort of my simplistic background Now, if you like, in terms of my current life as Noyescape. We sort of cross over between development design operations, but it's all come from that background as an architect great.

Speaker 4:

I'm tom the, I'm a founder of no escape alongside james um. No escape, really, I suppose, is a kind of culmination of many years of different kinds of sort of work and processes and thinking. So it's kind of after a sort of long journey we've come to Noyescape. Before that we ran private practice in London and predominantly working in residential but also some workplace. Prior to that I have kind of taught architecture, particularly in London, and also my sort of start of my journey into architecture was at Richard Rogers Partners and then Fashion Architecture Taste and where I was a kind of young graduate in the recession who found my way into doing lots of competitions with them.

Speaker 2:

But Noyescape is where we're at now and it's kind of, I suppose as a result of being on sort of many design journeys we've come to sort of noisecapes the culmination of lots of different experiences yeah, yeah, amazing and um, you know, with, with three kind of ex-architects around the table, we're going to have um a good debate here, I think, about you know that training, that that way of looking at the world, way of seeing things, um, and how you can apply that to different things. And that's particularly something I'm interested in, in getting your perception on, because you know you've come from a design background but now you are um very much operating, owning um real estate, but also um places where people live, and experiences and and um dealing with that side of of property. So it's quite different from the training I would have thought in terms of the architecture and and how are you, how are you finding that and how are you seeing um those experiences full circle, kind of relating to the product and what you're looking at?

Speaker 3:

I suppose for us, the nature of where we've got to has come as a consequence of wanting to deliver buildings. I think we've both got an inherent interest in cities in London, in design and architecture, and I think development has always felt relatively natural to us, as has operations, as has being a good host. So that combination of things really has come one after the other. We started in practice as architects, but we've always wanted to deliver good buildings. That's been at the core of, I think, what we still seek to do in projects we're currently working on and that that has never left us.

Speaker 3:

I think the transition from architecture as a pure practice into development has been one where we probably had some frustration out of clients who weren't able to, didn't want to deliver the projects that we were working on with them. We had opportunities. We also worked with developers who had sites that they had worked with us on to get planning and they didn't want to carry them through in the development phase, and that's where our development journey started. But we've always been on building sites. We've been on building sites from a young age, so the development process and the process of construction, therefore informing how we think about design, has been there for a long time and equally we've got a history in property and renting. So I think that triangle of sort of design development operations has been a very, very natural thing for us and has come from the idea of creating good places for people to live and work yeah, and what do you see that as?

Speaker 2:

then what? What is the noise scape vision in that sense, then, around good places for people to live and work?

Speaker 4:

I think in terms of noise gate, really what defines noise gate is the ability to kind of create places that kind of integrate kind of living and working. I suppose our background has very much been sort of had been in private practice, kind of single use, so particularly kind of residential. But the relationship between kind of living and working allows a kind of much more expansive kind of understanding of how you can create an experience for somebody throughout the day and throughout the week. And because we're also operating in spaces, we can start to look at that kind of part that architects never get to control, which is beyond kind of the kind of point a project completes. So you start to kind of think about how the kind of spaces you conceived of actually get used in an operational kind of cycle and more than that, you actually get to kind of consider the content and the experiences that people have in those spaces. So for me it kind of relates to kind of practices that were really interested in, I suppose the programming of buildings like kind of. For me it was kind of relating back to kind of the programming of buildings, like kind of for me it was kind of relating back to kind of the work of Archigram where they were really interested in the actual experience of the building and the experience and how that experience kind of related to the city and for their interests are very much informed by technology. But it creates a kind of unique position for the architect to actually start to think about the narrative and the culture and the experiences that people will have in their buildings. So that kind of opened up something entirely different for us where we could not only kind of think about the building spatially in a relationship between programs and really start to understand if we have both living and working in social space in one building. We have all these interfaces to consider and all these kind of relationships between how through the day people uses that space.

Speaker 4:

That became something really interesting for us as we sort of transition from that idea of what we call mono-use buildings, like living or working, where people generally use them for sort of like a block of time during the day, to a building that has kind of multiply programmed uses and there's a lot more frequent connection and crossover between those uses and we've seen that as kind of like a really interesting spatial opportunity but also the ability to kind of conceive of the kind of experience that people have in the building, so the culture and the purpose of that building.

Speaker 4:

We start to have much more authorship over that and that's kind of a really exciting thing because it kind of allows us to, I suppose, really kind of expand the role of a designer and consider how that kind of our thoughts can be brought into the life of the building, so in terms of noise, scape and the way we think about our shared spaces.

Speaker 4:

You know, a good part of our time now is really still to look at creating content and the content that goes into those buildings, not just for residents but also for the local community, and how the communal parts become a kind of really kind of important spatial and programmatic resource where it informs the lives of residents but it also informs the lives of people that live locally.

Speaker 4:

And it does something else, which is starts to become a space that reflects local culture by supporting kind of what we see as kind of like talent in the area, particularly from visual arts. It becomes a kind of place where it starts to stage the kind of the cultural and the identity of an area and the reason why this is really interesting to us because it kind of relates back to our early experience of London, where culture was very grassroots and it was very much about how things came from the ground up, particularly in music and visual arts. So we were always really interested, and this obviously is something we can only now do is kind of operate in buildings to look at ways that we could start to really kind of, you know, have places that became really key in terms of exposing the culture of the area that was around them.

Speaker 3:

And I think in that sense the word that Tom uses there is really important experience. I think sometimes the ability for the architect to influence the experience in operation is limited, other than the means through which they choreograph the space in which someone's going to inhabit. And I think our job through Noyescape has been to understand, having designs developed, own and operating residential space, how we can continue to improve. And each project that we do is a learning exercise to inform the next set of projects. You know we speak to all of the, the people that stay with us and live in our spaces, the people that work in our spaces, the people who carry exhibitions in our spaces. We're constantly learning about the things that are important to them to be able to make the next set of spaces experientially as good, if not better.

Speaker 3:

And I think that word experience is really important because it's fundamentally part of what we're interested in. It doesn't stop at practical completion. Our job doesn't stop there. There we are custodians of those assets into the life beyond that point in time, and therefore we have to think hard, work hard to make sure that those experiences are good, because ultimately we have to be a good host and design is a fundamental part of that, but it's that that cycle of design, develop and operate enables us to think about projects. I think, in a very different kind of way.

Speaker 4:

I mean it allows a kind of really different type of synthesis. I think the architect can respond to a brief. We in a sense are kind of coming up with a brief, responding to the brief, often working with different kinds of design collaborators, and then we've got to deliver the brief and then we've got to kind of operate the brief, often working with different kinds of design collaborators, and then we've got to deliver the brief and then we've got to kind of operate the brief. And I think in a way it goes back to some of our kind of frustration when we were working for clients in an architectural sense was probably the kind of inability to really question the purpose of the brief. So particularly with residential in London, you know, you might have often had situations where there's kind of a brief of five en-suites.

Speaker 4:

Now our job always is and this is something we do very frequently, particularly in the typology we work is we really question the kind of use of capital and resources to kind of understand how we can create kind of both efficiencies and cultural change, to create the experience, the new types of experiences, through a kind of very thorough investigative synthesis process that looks at, well, if we change that, if we take out those five. Ensuite, what's the cultural change in the building or the way the building's used, what's the way that the investment changes so that we could kind of use that money in a different way? Now we have to do that currently in a way that we actually look at placing some of the investment in the physical asset but some of it in the operational cycle, so we can create really strong content and through the content we change the experience that people have in the building. But it actually goes back to probably the relationship we often have with clients was we felt that that synthesis and that interrogation wasn't allowed in a really detailed way. That led to different outcomes. And we sort of use that interrogative process, which is a very architectural thing because it's all about analysis of options and analysis of what's the consequences of that spatial structure, what's the consequences of that budget change.

Speaker 4:

We really play with that process very significantly because we know that that ensures that we'll have a really good ability to understand the possibility of a project and sometimes, because we now kind of work, if you like, we're the client as well as the sort of design team leader we have a flexibility to sometimes kind of test things in in a kind of really extreme range of ways.

Speaker 4:

So currently, because we're responsible for energy costs in our building so the water usage, lighting, heating we're really interested in the way that through the day we can create different densities of occupation so we really start to reduce energy costs. So we're interested in how our spatial organizations and how our activation of the building could start to lend itself to really reducing operational costs through cultural change, if you like, that we really encourage people to use shared space and through that we create stronger experiences as well as efficiencies in the building. Now, acting as a normal architect, we would never be presented that question as a client design team leader. We can understand from the client side the needs to create really efficient buildings that have very strong kind of performance requirements criteria, but we can also investigate through spatial and cultural change how we could arrive at those results. And that is a kind of freedom that our structure gives us and it's about a kind of ability to be, you know, the overall synthesis of all of the components that are normally fragmented. We put them all together yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

I think it's fascinating and, as you say, for for your model, which is end to end.

Speaker 2:

In that respect, I think it's um, it's unique to have that different perspective across those different disciplines, across. You know design, development and operation, and I'm fascinated by the, the role that language plays in how we all kind of describe things. And you know, as you've kind of touched on there, tom particularly, you know words like investigative, programmatic and city. These kind of languages are very associated with. You know architecture of the environment, industry, and then uh content experience and being a host, james, are very associated with operational um perspectives and lenses and um. Have you learned um from those different disciplines, um or different roles? You know fundamentally different ways of of going about any one stage of the process or or or do you feel it's kind of um sort of maybe validated some of those uh things you've learned or historically applied, say when you were in architecture?

Speaker 3:

I think what I'd probably firstly say is that what we've recognised, and part of the frustration that we have with the way that development currently takes place, is that it's fragmented and that fragmentation means there is a lack of consistency, which traditionally the architect would have, but vision over how the project is delivered.

Speaker 1:

And if you take.

Speaker 3:

London, in the typical scenario, or anywhere across the UK, you have the land which might be sold by a landowner to a developer. Developer develops and sells on to end owner and in the middle you've got design team and various number of consultants. And we often find that there's a lack of vision and cohesion in an understanding. Ultimately, people will occupy those spaces, be that commercial, be it residential, and I think the uniqueness that we've been able to get to is an oversight on, ultimately, the end goal is what's the experience of the people in the building and how do we look at the programmatic requirements, the investment requirements, the operation requirements at the outset to ensure that we create really good buildings and really good experiences. And we've tried to bring all of those stages together and understand where we've worked on our own projects how do we best do that? How do we best do it?

Speaker 3:

But it's come out of an understanding from our point of view that we're frustrated with projects that we do see being brought forward in London and across the UK that they're not necessarily of the best quality, and that's not even talking about design as an experience, that the quality of the experience that the occupants have, I would say in a lot of cases is average to poor and our job as architects is to fundamentally change that and say we want to produce really good experiences, we want to produce good buildings, but it comes back to having a cohesive view over those processes from end to end, to make sure that each interface as we do as architects we try and understand the brief, understand the problem and create a really good solution to it. But it starts with that point of view that the fragmentation is not leading necessarily to good outcomes.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I mean I'm kind of. I suppose I am really interested in the way that, with an architect's ability to kind of sort of use their skill set, one of the things that they can achieve is to kind of retain value in a skill set. One of the things that they can achieve is to kind of retain value in a project all the way through the project, because they do have a kind of real sense of overview and they have a sense of how to kind of consider the kind of like the objective or the content of the project, how it can be brought all the way through to the finished product. And I think that fragmentation that James notes is that it's fragmented in terms of it's very difficult for somebody to have that overview and maintain it all the way through a project. So the value of the project is kept consistently for each kind of element. It's because we're so kind of based on, you know, planning consent. Often the site goes off to someone else. Then another developer comes in. They have completely objectives that developer isn't really interested beyond practical completion. So while everyone at the moment, particularly in our typology, is talking about, you know, the kind of operational side, realistically no developer who's delivering this typology is really interested in operational side, because they're not going to own the asset, so of course they won't, they're not investing their time in it because they've gone.

Speaker 4:

So what we have the ability to do is to kind of both build value through all the cycles but maintain value for all the cycles. So the normal extraction that happens, be it on planning, uplift or be it through the development cycle or be it the completion of development at pc, where most of the value goes off, such that in the operational cycle there's very little to invest in the operational experience. We know that's critical. So we retain value and we ensure there's value retained both in terms of post-planning positions, so we can invest properly in the construction side and get the right product, but also that the project can produce the income to invest in the construction side and get the right product. But also the project can produce the income to invest in the operational side to get the experience that the customer is going to want. The key difference here is this is now we're talking about operational assets and the value of operational assets is driven by the net income as well as let's call it the value of the brand, the value of the experience. So that places a very different focus on how we use our skills to kind of create that value early on or create a vision early on, maintain it all the way through the cycles and then ensure that it's still there for the customer at the end.

Speaker 4:

Real estate really has been structured that each component in that fragmented journey extracts value along the journey. So there's either not enough to invest in the architecture or there's definitely often not enough to invest in the experience of those people that are actually going to pay rent to live in these buildings. We say that's obviously a fundamental problem. We can see in terms of the business side that our first priority is the customer on the product, because if we get that bit right and we're good hosts and we deliver good experiences and we create good spaces in which they live, then they're happy and there'll be very substantial demand, as there is.

Speaker 4:

So because we keep, we know we're holding on to the building as an operator, we have to maintain that value all the way through and protect, if you like, the extraction such that all the value doesn't go off to the equity and there's nothing left and that's, in a way, noise social which runs our shared spaces.

Speaker 4:

It's a kind of way that we reflect. Our approach as developers is to actually be very bedded into our communities and to invest back into them in terms of providing these spaces and actually to grow their cultural identity, because often the process of development does extract, does take away from the areas it goes into and those kind of communities and those cultures become somewhat eroded and we really want to have a process that prevents that, that we want to maintain and add to the cultures that are in the places that we develop, because we have long-term operational assets and we see it as essential what we add to those places yeah, yeah, it's fascinating and, um, maybe let's hold the thought on the this, this cultural identity piece about growth, because I really want to come back to that and focus on that.

Speaker 2:

Um, but if I you know, we've had a very detailed and interesting conversation there um, as if I was a, a person within the value chain, so a developer or or a building industry professional investor, if I take my hat off now and I'm now a guest, I'm now a customer. How do you talk to me? What do you say to me? Why do I come to noisecape to one of your properties?

Speaker 4:

I think we we start off with being interested in the person. Yeah, so we know that the experience of being in a building with lots of different guests from different parts of the world we have a kind of very diverse demographic that come with a diverse scope in terms of age and places, where they come from and what they're doing when they come to London. What our job really is to do is to kind of create the introduction between them, because they're all doing the interesting things and they're all at that point of experience as a city. So we, in a way, are kind of facilitators. We open the conversation between them and we provide spaces where they can share their experience of the city and we also create events or content. We've got one tonight which is with a company called cady brothers, which is our. There are mushroom farmers and we're doing a supper club, which is one of the ways that we bring people together.

Speaker 4:

One of the kind of sort of key areas for us is kind of food culture and we work with lots of different people to give our residents experiences that are based on food, sharing food. So we kind of, I suppose, really look at the point they're at in their lives and what they need from a city and we look at how we can best service that in practical terms but also how we can create experiences that are going to allow them to meet the other people that live with them and also to kind of introduce them to the cultures that we think are important in London, which again range from kind of generally are in the visual arts, but it'd be kind of music, fashion, design, because that's our interest. So through the spaces where they live they get to experience some of the people that are in those areas around the area that they live in, so that their kind of experience sort of starts to extend in, particularly in terms of the local location, as well as kind of introducing them to what's going on in London. But I think we try and amplify their experience of being in the city, both in terms of the physical space they're in but also what they can access. And I think the other thing we do is we just listen to them. We're really interested throughout the process of all buildings we've designed with um clients or clients as well as kind of now, um, I suppose, customers we call them kind of our residents or members um, we're really interested in what they need from where they live and how they're living in the city, because we're constantly trying to pick up on micro trends that inform the design.

Speaker 4:

This goes back to the architectural piece, which is that feedback is really critical to us because it helps us design the next project. So how are they working? How much are they moving around the city? Where are they visiting in the city or where they're not visiting? How much of their life is spent just sitting on a laptop? What do they want to do while they're in London? So we're constantly asking all those questions and it's a kind of informal feedback process and, in a way, those questions and that feedback has actually really informed the typology spatially to the point where we're kind of interested in what are the programs in a larger building we're going to introduce? How much are they going to be the things that we think people do in their everyday lives compared to? We're going to inject something that's entirely new and it's going to be a very unique experience for them. But that process I think, yeah, listening is really important and facilitation of how they can experience their time in the city.

Speaker 3:

I think we also understand the process of what it takes to rent somewhere in a city like london. And again, that end-to-end nature of how we do things means that, because we do operate, we have to understand the process between delivering a project and getting people in the building. How do we communicate the product and the offer? How do we speak to people in that process? What are the pain points for people? You know, ultimately there is a customer, that's someone who rents our space, and we have to get to know, and have got to know very intimately the nature of the problems that they encounter. Now. If you take, for instance, typically five, ten years ago, you're using a state agent. You know, let's say, you're coming from abroad, you've got to physically be in the uk to locate a space. Once you're here, you might have a six, eight-week process of looking at spaces and it's quite stressful. So fast forward to where we are now. We get 60% of our inquiries through Instagram, online for people who are not in the UK. They're able to see our spaces online and they're able to pre-book three months in advance of coming to London, and it's because we've understood the nature of the problems that they encounter in trying to locate space that we've addressed, that we have to communicate to them through good photography, through a good product, and communicate very quickly in digital space, a process by which we gain trust with them, so they can see the photography, they can see the spaces that we've designed. There's an instantaneousness to their ability to go. I'm okay with that. That looks like the sort of place I want to be, and of course, that's then followed up with human connection. So we have real people who are at the end of an email, at the end of a phone, who can answer questions and make that person feel comfortable and safe. And that comes back to experience that, the customer experience that they get in dealing with an organization like noisecape.

Speaker 3:

Ultimately, we're a place to live, work and socialize. So at a practical level, we provide places where people live, we have spaces in which people can work and fundamentally that's brought together by social connection and the community we create within the buildings and we communicate that online to them such that they can understand the type of experience they may receive when they get here and when they stay with us. And then, of course, we have to back that up, with that being the experience they do get. But I think that's the nature of what we've been able to do as a learning process.

Speaker 3:

What we've been able to do as a learning process is that we can conceive of things as architects and we can create concepts for how we think people, people may live, and conceptualize the types of spaces that they may want. We obviously have to have to have to test that essentially against people saying, well, yes, I do want to live there. Then we have to gain feedback and we have to continue in the next project with making that better and that that is a really important distinction, I think, between, again, the fragmented nature of how we see development being procured generally is that there's a misalignment with the ultimate thing the architecture, the building, the space, the product that we feel often doesn't work for the customer, and it's with, I suppose, our disappointment in a lot of cases of looking at projects and spaces that don't quite work and saying we need to find a solution for that. And that design process is one element, and then it's about the experience that you get as well, and it's trying to join all those things up and constantly learn.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, they're fascinating. And then, one of the things that I've admired through our conversations together, and and your approach and your model. What is that in that integration and that we've already talked about? But when I look at the the alternative living space, if you want to call it that, so you know, co-living apart hotels, um, branded residences, a lot of them um, there is a tendency for them to be quite inward looking, for them to be about the experience that they're creating for their customer type, which is obviously super important because that's the basis of the product and the model.

Speaker 2:

But I think something that you guys are really key on is okay, how how does your products and and and therefore the people in them, how is that outward looking? How are you connecting with the neighborhood? Um, how are you listening not only to your customers but to to the local people and the culture, as you described, of a place? And I think that's super exciting from a urban city social perspective as well, from a kind of customer perspective, um. So so could you maybe talk a little bit about that and and and also the kind of the richness, probably, and the value that that brings to the experiences of your guests, because I'm assuming there is this kind of like symbiotic relationship between those two things and being in a grandma growing up in London, being in pubs and clubs.

Speaker 3:

they're social spaces fundamentally, and your ability to sit in a pub on your own and be quite comfortable doing that as opposed to being in a pub in a group of people and equally being comfortable and I suppose we reference that because that type of experience is fundamental to understanding how we consider people who are coming to our buildings may want to get to know people in a space they're not familiar with. How do we start to create that? And I think, culturally, that's really important for us to be able to look at that spatial typology, and I think that's something we reference quite a lot in terms of that typology as being really important yeah, definitely.

Speaker 4:

I think, in terms of a kind of the spatial side of things and kind of being outward looking, I suppose the pub is really interesting to us because it's that kind of space that is accessible to everyone and you can go in as an individual or you can go in as a group. But even if you're an individual you can, through the kind of rituals of the pub, you can end up having a conversation and you can also get a sense of maybe what's local, what's kind of music culture is happening in that pub. There's a whole set of histories and sort of transactions and exchanges that happen in pubs and we're interested in spaces that have that capacity to create that interaction. So that I think it kind of is in a sense a response to, we feel, that kind of housing in london, and particularly in the last 20 years it's kind of absolutely failed in this area. All right, so we have this kind of essentially you know organisation that we can argue that the quality of housing may have gone up and the sort of standards that form that housing may have gone up, but the actual experience and the kind of conceptualisation of housing as a typology, particularly at a time when we've had kind of fundamental macro change in terms of how people live, how people communicate, how people socialise. We've had no innovation in housing whatsoever programmatically, spatially or culturally.

Speaker 4:

So I have to kind of go back to the sort of Unite to get a sense of the point at which architecture had a vision for how you could reconceptualise how we live in cities, the concept of a home, how it relates to others, how it relates to community, how it relates to kind of a series of uses and how it related back to the city. So we have to kind of go, say, 70 years on to now where we're saying, you know, we're just trying to recapture that spirit of looking at what's informing people's lives in terms of how they work and the technologies that are changing their lives, and find an architecture that responds to that and, most importantly, find an architecture which is allowing those people that live there to connect and interact with their locality in terms of the people around them and the cultures around them. So our kind of interest in that is really in a simple way, is that where two things meet, something else happens okay. So if we have a building that brings a set of very generally quite fluid residents and we connect that with a locality that has concerned histories and certain cultures and a mix of demographics and we find ways for a conversation to take place between those two groups as well as a space that they may both occupy. We know that there's an interesting kind of interaction and that interaction is really for us the kind of enjoyment and excitement of architecture, as well as being kind of operators, because we know that those conversations sort of explode and happen and all those cultures kind of interact.

Speaker 4:

So it's that idea that housing should be outlooking, housing should connect its locality, housing should have a public component and it should very much not be, in the context of where we're at in the world, about just privacy, domesticity, ownership and kind of removal from the city. We see it should be the exact opposite of that and this is a fundamental problem because the concept of housing drives London plan policy loads of planning policy which is not understanding the way actually people live and what they want from the places that they live. You know why does a single person need 50 square metres? It's, it's crazy waste of capital. It's a crazy waste of a moment where we're really starting to kind of assess the carbon in body carbon, operational carbon.

Speaker 4:

The first thing we should be doing is looking at why are we, why are we subscribing to policy that by its nature is requiring loads more resources than is needed for one person to live in a city, particularly in terms of if we get into how people work, where those people work for where they live? Clearly that is a kind of really wasteful strategy. But the interaction part is fundamental to noise gate because essentially our diagram city in the building is about how we can create all those connections and interactions Because we want at those edges for spatial interest and the cultural interest and the experiential interest to explode really.

Speaker 3:

And I think there's a real keenness to provide a richness of experience and I think that's why we have a range of types of programming happens. If you take High Street House, for instance. At ground floor we have supper clubs, we have exhibitions. The most recent one is a two-week exhibition with a young career who brought eight young global artists to a high street in West London. Again, our. Our first guest in that opening evening was a local chap in his 70s who was excited by the possibility of accessing art on a high street. Now that's a very different type of experience. You as an organisation have to be clear that that's part of what you want to do and offer. And we're clear and that's important to us, because both entities gain from that. The local community gain from the fact that they can access that exhibition and the residents gain from the fact that they can access that exhibition. And the residents gain from the fact that they can access the exhibition and they can meet each other. And, as Tom mentioned, where those two sets of people meet, the conversation starts.

Speaker 4:

And much of what we try and do in our shared spaces is facilitate social interaction, enable humans to be able to feel comfortable, nodding ahead, shaking, shaking hands, and the start of the conversation for us is the start of the sea I think the other typology probably that we both kind of really see being kind of very important within london is obviously parks and how that idea we're generally interested in, I suppose, the idea of how you can utilise economy of scale to deliver more for more audiences. So the idea of the park really in some ways is we kind of will contribute to that in some way through, let's say, taxes. Everybody can access it. Everybody's kind of free to use that space. You know, let's say in programmatic terms, be it for picnic, sport, read a book, whatever it is, we forget how kind of fundamental they are to our experience in the city. So in our very micro way we're interested in a kind of similar type of space that's kind of very open and accessible to local community, to kind of for us to kind of expose the kind of talent that's in local communities but also for residents to take that space. So some of our residents have put on events, be it supper clubs or exhibitions as well, and in a way to kind of allow that fluidity and flexibility to be a reflection of the people in the building and people in the locality.

Speaker 4:

But fundamentally it's that thing about the public life of cities that we see that, as you know, there's two types of existence in city you can be private in your own private space and you can be public on the street, and it's a celebration of those two possibilities and we enjoy the fact that this typology can actually do both in one building. But fundamentally we want to extend the public life of cities, be it on a high street, at the scale that we work at, because that really is something that's very much architectural. It comes from our architectural background that we see that as a kind of fundamental requirement. We spend a lot of time having to explain that to people from the investment world and trying to rationalise it in terms of the impact it has on the residents and the value it brings to residents, but the value it brings to local communities and also within operational assets, that over time how valuable those buildings will be within those communities, how much benefit they will bring to those communities.

Speaker 2:

And we see that as a kind of an investment strategy that is kind of very logical but often isn't received in that way yeah, yeah, no, it's all um super fascinating and I agree, I think it's fundamental to the success of of cities, but also of of um models like your, like your own. So, um, yeah, there's a massive amount in line with what we're doing at great places, with, with in that respect, and um so, so, so, just to maybe to conclude then so what, what does the the future look like for? For noisecape, the work you're you're doing, um where you want to take the brand, and and the services you want to offer people?

Speaker 4:

I think we We've spent a long time developing this integrated approach so we can really kind of understand it as a process and understand how it works in terms of value and commercially how it gets structured.

Speaker 4:

We're at a point now where we've had a lot of feedback, we've done a lot of testing, we've tested it at a scale.

Speaker 4:

We really understand the customer. We really understand the customer, we really understand the product and the kind of the opportunity of this typology. We've kind of really got that feedback now in a place where we can start to take it to a different scale. So our next job really is to really take the typology, take all the learning and bring it to a different scale and work in different ways with other organizations to kind of, I suppose, bring our synthesis, the design team, the structure of the way we've we've worked to work with other organizations, kind of building owners and investors, to look at how this typology can be brought to a different scale for us. But but across potentially many cities, but importantly that there's a network of buildings that interact and provide an opportunity for residents to kind of move between that network as well as people that are, let's say, working using those spaces or accessing the cultural content, to be able to have a whole network of buildings.

Speaker 3:

That's what excites us, is the possibility of a series of buildings that have this, that kind of take on this, the opportunity of this typology across many cities currently, we've got over 5 000 people on our database who, in the last 24 months, have filled out an inquiry form on our website to come and stay with us. Our biggest frustration, as is theirs, is that they can't currently because we're fully occupied.

Speaker 4:

So we want to extend the opportunity of what we've done so far and expand that to create a network of sites across london, in the uk and hopefully into europe in the future, where we can enable people to experience what all of our current residents experience, which is a really great living experience and a place where they can come for however long they need to live and meet new people, and that, hopefully, is what we'll do over the coming years and I think that that ambition is now underpinned by a kind of a sort of body of work where we've really looked very closely at, particularly in terms of the operational cycle, how that invest, investment into the experiential and cultural content can really drive demand, can drive price points, can drive the kind of consistency of demand, but also, through design, how we can really create buildings that are significantly more efficient in terms of their operational cycle, in terms of energy use, which will eventually have a very significant impact upon cost and therefore make these assets more valuable because they just use less resources.

Speaker 4:

So that's taken time to do that, but we are now clear in terms of where the opportunities are through design to deliver assets that are significantly they're performing much more, and we understand where you can invest in design to bring those long-term operational benefits, particularly in terms of kind of energy use tom james, thank you very much for your time, everything you're doing.

Speaker 2:

I think it's right at the zeitgeist of what urban living, um, for the future, really can do for guests, for customers, but also for neighborhoods and, um, yeah, fascinated to watch it develop for you guys. Thanks so much.

Speaker 1:

Good to speak to you thank you for listening to the grow places podcast. For more information, visit growplacescom and follow us at. We grow places across all social channels. See you next time.