An architecture and interior practice working in slow, durable materials — for people who plan to stay.
Studio in Springfield, Illinois
Work across the Midwest
SWP Architecture is an independent studio for homes, workplaces and small cultural buildings. We draw in plan and think in daylight, testing every room against the hour it will be used most.
Six rooms from projects completed between 2023 and 2026.
The studio has stayed small on purpose. Everyone here draws, everyone visits site, and the person who takes your first call is on the project until the keys change hands.
We work in a converted printworks off Maplewood Lane, with the model shop in the back room and a material library you are welcome to come and handle before deciding anything.
Three projects that show the range of the practice: a private house, a workplace fit-out, and a small pavilion built for a public garden.
Each was drawn in-house, detailed with the trades who built it, and handed over with a maintenance plan written in plain language.
Completed 2026 · Springfield, Illinois
A four-bedroom house built into a sloping corner plot. Board-marked concrete carries the street edge; inside, the plan turns away from the road and opens to a walled garden.
Completed 2025 · Peoria, Illinois
A 1970s distribution shed turned into studio space for forty people. The existing frame stayed; we cut a stair through the middle and brought daylight down to the ground floor.
Completed 2024 · St. Louis, Missouri
A shelter and tool store for a community garden, designed to be taken over by planting. The climbing wall was set out with the growers so each species reaches the height it needs.
Everything the studio is licensed to do, and the long conversations with planners that make it possible.
Est. 2016
Springfield IL
Houses, studios and small public buildings on tight or awkward plots, taken from first sketch to final inspection.
21 completed since 2016
Adding to a building without flattening what was already good about it — including change-of-use applications.
Most common project type
Fabric-first work on older buildings: damp, breathability, insulation and the heritage consents that go with them.
A third involve protected structures
Most clients come to us at the sketch stage and stay through to handover. We are happy to be brought in later, for a single room or a planning problem.
New houses, extensions and change-of-use conversions, from first survey to site sign-off. We run the drawings, the consultants and the builder conversations.
Rooms designed alongside the building rather than after it, so joinery, lighting and services are settled before the walls close up.
Daylight modelling and an electric lighting layer that matches it — warm at the edges of the day, even and useful in the middle.
A written maintenance plan, a folder of what was used and where it came from, and a call in the first winter to see how the building is behaving.
Five materials do most of the work across our projects. They age in public, take a knock, and can be repaired by a local trade rather than replaced.
Board-marked concrete
Poured against sawn pine, left untreated
Reclaimed brick
Salvaged within the state, lime mortar
Douglas fir
Structure and joinery, soap finish
Lime plaster
Breathable, patched rather than painted
Blackened steel
Stairs, frames and thresholds, waxed
Four stages, each ending in something you can hold: a document, a drawing set, a finished room. You approve one before the next begins.
1
Two visits, a measured survey, and an honest read on what the site and the budget will allow.
2
Three plans at the same scale, costed roughly, so the trade-offs are visible before anything is fixed.
3
Full drawings, specifications and the planning or permit submission, with consultants coordinated by us.
4
Site visits at agreed intervals, a snag list you can read, and the maintenance folder at the end.
64
Projects completed since the studio opened in 2016
9
People in the studio, all working on drawings
18
Months, the average length of a house project
41%
Of new work comes from past clients and their neighbours
They spent a whole morning watching where the sun landed in the old kitchen before drawing anything. The new one is where it should have been all along.
Dana Whitlock — Hollis Residence, Springfield
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Three stairs from three projects, priced honestly, with the reasons one of them came in at four times the others.
Salvaged brick suits some walls and quietly ruins others. A short guide to telling the two apart before you order a pallet.
If yours is not here, send it over. We would rather answer it now than at the end of a site visit.
The first conversation and site walk are free. The feasibility stage — survey, constraints, and three costed options — is a fixed fee agreed in writing before we start, usually between $4,000 and $9,000 depending on the size of the building.
Two to three weeks from the survey. You get three plans at the same scale so you can compare them properly, plus a rough cost against each one.
Yes. Roughly a third of our work touches a protected structure or a conservation district. We handle the heritage statements and the pre-application meetings ourselves.
We can, provided the building work is either finished or being run by someone we can talk to. Joinery, lighting and finishes are often the part that makes the difference, and they are worth doing well on their own.
We do, if you want us to. Contract administration is an optional stage: we tender the job, check the valuations, visit at agreed intervals and hold the snag list. Some clients run this themselves and we stay on for design questions only.
Send the address, a few photographs and what you would like to change. We reply within two working days and the first conversation costs nothing.
A finished project, a detail that went wrong and what we did about it, and whatever the model shop is busy with. No sales, and you can leave in one click.
The studio letter
A finished project, a detail that went wrong and what we did about it. No sales, and you can leave in one click.
