Quiet Spaces: A Talk by Architect William Smalley

Smalley has a longstanding relationship with Kettle’s Yard, first coming as a child with his grandfather, a mathematics fellow at Gonville and Caius. More recently, it is cited as one of his inspirations in his book.

Smalley’s architectural spaces are extraordinary for the sensitivity of his response to place and light, and an empathy for how space makes us feel. Edmund de Waal observes Smalley’s “feeling for the kindness of materials”. His clients speak of the uplifting joy of being in his spaces. Smalley writes that

Architects have the power to carve emotion in space and to provide places for our emotions.

Space is an experience, a feeling. Space is how a building makes you feel. Architecture is how you feel in it.

After studying architecture at Edinburgh he founded his own practice in 2010 based in Bloomsbury, London. With an interest in how spaces make us feel, his work straddles architecture and interior design. He is currently working on projects in UK, New York and New Zealand. Smalley has been interviewed and written for the Financial Times and is included in House & Garden’s and Country Life’s Top 100 lists.

In November 2025, Smalley’s project Hardwicke Court in Gloucestershire won a Georgian Group Architectural Award (winner of ‘New Building in a Georgian Context’).