Practice
Our design studio and construction company delivers conceptually driven work across residential, commercial, and cultural commissions. Like the great firms and production studios of the past, SPEEDBOAT brings comprehensive design and technical capabilities under one roof to deliver ambitious projects at scale.
We operate in different modes depending on each commission: providing design services, leading design with construction partners, or designing and building the work directly. Architects, interior specialists, landscape practitioners, and craftspeople collaborate with owners, designers, fabricators, and consultants.
Capabilities
Structure
The workshop develops strategy, brand partnerships, and design innovation. This division handles business development, client relationships, and design research that informs the studio's approach to new building typologies and material applications.
The Studio provides licensed architecture, engineering coordination, and construction documentation. Architects here move projects from concept through permitting and produce the drawings that drive construction.
Field Operations delivers construction expertise when the studio builds its designs. Superintendents, carpenters, and craft specialists execute the structural systems, millwork, and assemblies that design requires. Field Operations also serves allied architecture firms seeking construction partners for their projects.
These divisions engage independently or together depending on project needs. On design-focused commissions, the Workshop and Studio lead while Field Operations remains uninvolved. When the studio designs and builds, all three divisions work in concert. For general contracting engagements with other architects, Field Operations leads with Studio support for constructability review.
Commercial & Institutional
The studio pursues cultural institutions, mixed-use developments, hospitality, and workplace projects. Experience includes museum work, gallery spaces, and adaptive reuse of industrial buildings. Commercial work focuses on projects where design ambition aligns with programmatic complexity and material investigation matters to the client.
Commercial and institutional work demands different considerations than residential. The studio collaborates with developers on feasibility studies, due diligence, and value engineering—balancing design ambition with financial performance. For institutional clients, design translates ambitious programmatic requirements into spatial organization and material expression.
The studio brings material rigor to commercial contexts: daylighting strategies that reduce energy loads, acoustic treatments for open workplaces, material palettes that age gracefully under heavy use. Detailing addresses commercial building code requirements, accessibility standards, and life safety systems while maintaining design intent. Projects coordinate multiple engineering disciplines—structural, mechanical, electrical, civil—and extensive consultant teams.
Spatial precision matters at institutional scale. Circulation systems move large numbers of people efficiently. Room proportions accommodate varied programs. Material transitions resolve complex assemblies. The studio translates concepts into construction documentation that contractors can build from.
Residential
The studio designs residential estates, multigenerational compounds, and large-scale residential developments across Los Angeles and California. Commissions range from ground-up construction to adaptive reuse and historic rehabilitation. Work includes fire rebuilds, hillside sites with complex structural demands, and properties navigating coastal commission or historic preservation requirements.
Residential commissions typically begin with understanding how families live across generations. The studio investigates daily rituals—cooking, gathering, solitude, celebration—and designs spaces that serve these activities. A kitchen becomes workspace and social anchor. Gardens extend living area. Studies provide retreat.
The studio designs for the long-term health of these rituals, prioritizing non-toxic natural substances and high-performance detailing that sustains both the building and its inhabitants. Material investigation drives residential design: reclaimed timber species, stone varieties, plaster compositions. The studio works with living artists and craftspeople to create custom hardware, furniture, ceramics, and metalwork that becomes integral to architecture. Natural light choreography considers how sun moves through space across days and seasons. Thermal comfort comes from material mass and passive ventilation. Acoustic intimacy emerges from room proportion and material selection.
When existing structures warrant preservation, the studio pursues adaptive reuse. Structure rehabilitation and passive design strategies shape architectural character. High-performance detailing—air sealing, thermal bridging elimination, window performance—becomes aesthetic opportunity. Archival research and regional building legacies—California Modernism, ranch typologies, agricultural structures—inform decisions about form and detail.
Process
Projects typically move through site analysis, design, documentation, and delivery. Site analysis establishes constraints and opportunities: zoning, topography, solar orientation, views, existing conditions. Design phases produce drawings exploring spatial organization, massing, material direction, and technical resolution. The studio coordinates with structural, mechanical, and civil engineers throughout the process.
Construction documentation produces the drawings that builders price and construct from: architectural plans, building sections, wall sections, details, schedules, and specifications. The studio estimates costs throughout design, reviews constructability with builders, and pursues value engineering when budgets require.
During construction, the studio can conduct site observation, review shop drawings and submittals, respond to field conditions, and document the work. When Field Operations builds the work, superintendents coordinate trades, manage schedules, and maintain quality control.
Direct communication sustains momentum. The studio maintains regular dialogue through design meetings, construction coordination, emails, and site visits as project needs require.