About O’BT_

O’BT is Breffní O’Brien and Ben Tipson.

We are interested in things that feel well judged.

Sometimes that’s simple and sometimes that’s more complex. Good proportions. Ordinary materials with enough character to carry themselves. Light that changes a room over the course of a day. Familiar things used in slightly unfamiliar ways. The point where two things meet. How something is made and how else it could be made. How someone else might want to make it.

O’BT works across buildings, interiors and smaller interventions. Sometimes the important thing is the whole plan. Sometimes it’s a window, a threshold, a kitchen or the way a piece of timber turns a corner.

We like architecture that can sit quietly in everyday life but still have something more to give when you spend time with it.

We try not to over-design things. Do less and make each decision count.

We met while studying architecture at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow. We both left with Master’s degrees with distinction and later completed our Part 3s in Birmingham.

Before Glasgow, Breffní studied in Dublin and worked in practice in Cork. She also spent time in Naweni, Fiji on a collaborative design-and-build project, learning about buildings in the most straightforward way possible - by helping to make one.

Ben studied in Nottingham before working in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, mostly with old buildings, listed buildings and the awkward but interesting bits of fabric you have to understand before deciding what to do with them.

We’ve taken slightly different routes but tend to meet in the same place.