LOM wins Architectural Practice of the Year

October 2024 | News| Awards|

We are overjoyed to have been named Architectural Practice of the Year at this year’s National Building & Construction Awards.

LOM Director, Simon Bird, and Associate Director, Patrick Hastings, were presented with the Gold Award in recognition of LOM’s high-quality, client-focused design work, delivered with insight and imagination. This achievement is a testament to the creativity, dedication, and hard work of our outstanding team, clients and project partners.

We are also delighted to share that Unity Place has received Silver in the Project of the Year (Over £25 Million) category!

Santander UK’s new mixed-used headquarters Unity Place has already been featured in The Times, The Sunday Times and The Financial Times. Times columnist Harry Wallop writes “we should celebrate a company that wants to build spaces for the public”. Santander have created a new kind of head office building, which is both a working ecosystem and a truly open part of the city.

This recognition builds on the earlier success of 2024, with our first fully net zero project, Barn X, winning a BCO Midlands Award in the category Projects under 2,500m2.

Barn X is high performing, sustainable workplace designed for Rare Games at their beautiful rural campus in Leicestershire. The timber framed barn is designed with an emphasis on biophilia and collaboration, creating a calm and creative studio environment, with a mix of scrum and meeting space, design studio space, and breakout and gaming areas.

Last but certainly not least, we are thrilled The Old Curiosity Shop won the RICS Heritage Award for London in the RICS UK Awards, delivered in close collaboration with Ayesa on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political Science.

The building is a rare surviving example of a late sixteenth to mid seventeenth century, timber framed building in central London, and one of the few survivors of the first phase of urban development in the area.

This curious Grade II-listed building in Westminster has an irregular plan and splayed façade to fit the small infill site. The shop was made famous by an American journalist who published a literary tour of Dickens’ London in 1881 which included a sketch of the quaint building, and ensued a growing number of tourists. Then, the shop’s celebrity was increased even more after it was under threat of demolition. Reporters, sketch artists and photographers lined up to record this piece of ‘Dickens’ London’ before it vanished!

All of these achievements would not be possible without our clients, partners and team. We look forward to continuing to design innovative and impactful spaces.