Why we work in two cities

I opened the Lisbon studio in 2019, after two seasons of working on Noturna from a café on Rua da Boavista with a laptop and a phone permanently on loudspeaker to Clerkenwell. When we signed the lease on the third floor at number 72, the plan was a satellite: a few designers close to one client. Five years later there are twelve of us here, and the studio works as one team in two rooms. This is how, and why we are not planning a third.

One clock

London and Lisbon keep the same time all year. The clocks go forward and back on the same night. It sounds like a small thing and it is the whole reason this works. There is no handover between cities, no morning in one office waiting for the other to wake up, no meeting held at an hour that suits only half the team. We share one stand-up at half past nine, with a long table in each room and a screen on the wall between them. Quiet hours run until noon in both places. Crits are at four. The Thursday review, where every client sees their work, is run from whichever room the project partner sits in, and the other room joins on the screen.

Staff every project from both rooms

The easiest mistake for a studio in two cities is to let each city own its own clients. It feels efficient, and within two years you have two studios with two cultures and a shared logo. So we do not do it. Every project team has people in both rooms. Noturna was designed here and animated in London. Corso’s design system was built in Lisbon, with discovery run from London. Casa Mareta’s website is being built downstairs from my desk right now, for a strategy team in Clerkenwell. The rooms have drifted towards different strengths, and we have let that happen. London holds strategy, identity, web and most of engineering. Lisbon has become the home of design systems, product, motion and 3D. But those strengths are shared out across projects, never walled off.

Two rooms on one clock is one team. Add a time zone and it becomes two companies.

What each city gives the other

• Lisbon gives London light, space and a longer lunch. Several London designers spend a fortnight here each year, and they come back calmer.
• London gives Lisbon a different set of clients, and a print shop downstairs that will proof almost anything by four o’clock.
• Both give clients a choice of where to hold a workshop. More of them pick Lisbon in February than we expected.

Why not a third

We are asked fairly often whether we will open in New York, or Berlin, or somewhere further east. The answer is no, and the reason is the clock. A studio one hour ahead could just about work. Anything more turns one team into two, with a handover at the end of every day and a partner who is always on a call while one of the rooms is asleep. We would also have to grow. Two rooms of this size fit around thirty-five people, which is enough to run up to ten projects at once with a partner on each. That is the studio we want to run. A third city would need another partner and a bigger company, and we would stop being able to sit in every Thursday review.

What it costs

Running two studios costs more than running one. We pay two leases, more travel than a single office would need, and for a screen that is never switched off. We think it is worth it. It lets us hire people who would never move to London, and it keeps both rooms honest: when work is shown on a screen to people in another city, it has to explain itself.