The company’s founding partners Duncan Baker-Brown and Ian McKay started collaborating on architectural projects at university. Whilst working towards their part three qualifications in 1993 they won an RIBA open competition to build a demonstration ‘House of the Future’ in Milton Keynes. BBM now has a well established office based in Lewes in East Sussex. During this time the practice’s reputation has grown as one of the country’s leading exponents of low energy design.

The practice has accumulated a diverse portfolio of Architecture and Interior design building projects which are notable for their innovative use of emerging low impact building materials. The range of building types includes new and refurbished private housing, schools, visitor’s centres, community and enterprise hubs, commercial offices, shop interiors, exhibitions and temporary urban interventions.

BBM have gained experience on large scale Urban Regeneration work, helping teams of consultants produce ideas, imagery and scheme design material, often gleaned from material generated through community workshops. Projects such as the The Bridge Community Centre and Creative Media Centre in Hastings have formed key components of socio-economic regeneration. With teaching links we have collaborated with local authorities to generate debate about design in the urban environment through projects such as the temporary transformation of Valley Gardens in Brighton. BBM were brought creative thinking and visualisation skills to the vision behind the flagship Greenwich Millennium Village - an exemplar of sustainability masterplanning.

As an environmental consultancy BBM has accumulated many years of experience in assessing energy use in buildings and the built environment and embodied energy impacts in construction, BBM can provide advice as a standalone consultancy or part of our everyday practice of architectural design.

Project visualisation produced by the practice has been used for advertising, major bid documents, exhibitions and book publications.

BBM regularly contribute lectures and presentations appearing at symposiums, seminars, workshops. We have also written articles for journals and newspapers, and presented issues of sustainability on both television and radio. The practice has run architectural education workshops for school children of all ages.

Since 1994 BBM have actively pursued in-house research projects such as ‘Cityvision’, a hypothetical urban study based on teleworking and more recently the breakthrough technology behind the Kevin McCleod eco-house for Grand Designs Live. The office have also become heavily involved with low energy retrofitting of the existing housing stock and are progressing a number of demonstration and research projects to monitor energy performance with occupant behaviour.