t is surprising, for a profession dedicated to erecting very large, very expensive and very durable structures, that architects are never taught how to actually build. In the five years of education in Britain, there is the occasional module on structural principles and the odd lecture on bricks, but most students graduate without a clue how to build a building. So when you encounter that rare species of architect who has worked on a building site, it shows. Design decisions take into account the practicalities of how things go together, rather than an idealised image being handed over for others to resolve. Such things as the weight of a breeze block and the process of hand-trowelling a concrete floor are given due consideration, as are ways of saving time and money. This hands-on experience is refreshingly evident in the work of Surman Weston, a young duo who, just a few years since graduating, have already built a number of small projects. Their first commission came while they were students at the Royal College of Art in London, building a cafe for the sculpture department in the form of an elegant wooden cage. Designed and made with fellow student Joseph Deane, this wasn’t just a cut above the institutional canteen – it looked as if it could be exhibited alongside sculptures in the college’s summer show. Then came a shingle-clad writer’s shed in London, that spawned several similar garden builds, laying the foundations for their latest and most substantial project: a quietly radical house in Surbiton. This archetypal suburban commuter haven on the south-west fringes of London isn’t known as a hotspot of contemporary architecture, nor does the new home leap out at first glance. Set back from the road, it looks like a child’s drawing of a house, a flat white cutout with a triangular pitched roof, one big square gridded window and an oversized front door. The cartoonish manner continues with a faint mock Tudor structural grid running across its facade, the diagonal bracing slicing through white-painted bricks. But here the grid is not stuck-on timber, like its neighbours, but a structural steel frame, the load-bearing bones of the building that allow the spatial gymnastics to happen inside. “It was quite a bizarre brief,” says Tom Surman, who was a building site foreman for a year after graduating, and spent several summer holidays working with his builder uncle. “The client loved the mid-century modernist homes of Palm Springs, and she also wanted a lofty industrial space, and it had to fit in with its suburban surroundings.” The result is a wonderfully original hybrid of these three unlikely influences, combining the feeling of an airy Californian villa with a raw industrial unit, clothed in a ghostly costume of subverted suburbia. Walking through the large, theatrically tapered entrance, you arrive in a dramatic triple-height lobby: the first sign that this is no ordinary suburban nest. A concrete staircase with a wire mesh balustrade winds up around one wall, while a gigantic Velux window brings light in through a corrugated metal ceiling. Exposed breeze block walls, coated in a slurry render to soften their rawness, lead through a lower-ceilinged corridor, down two shallow steps, to a large oak door that opens into the main living area. It is a compelling collage of the rough and the refined, with cheap materials elevated by how they are deployed. Extending the 12-metre width of the house, with no columns in sight, the living room has a full-height panoramic window on to the garden, the glazing divided with the same supersized square grid as the window on the front of the house. It is a motif that echoes both the area’s 1930s Crittall windows and a scaled-up version of mock Tudor leaded windows, repurposed here on a more industrial scale. The factory vibe continues with metal ceilings, simply exposing the undersides of the profiled steel floor decks above – a system that’s more commonly used for multi-storey car parks. “We’re really into the nuts and bolts of how things go together,” says Surman. “It’s important that you can read how it’s made, and it’s not all covered up with plasterboard.” The lack of the usual finishings helped keep costs down, too, with the total construction budget coming in at £600,000. From the back garden, the house is something else entirely. It is more reminiscent of an Alpine hayloft, with a perforated brick wall running across the upper level, again punctured by one big central cyclopean opening. The first floor projects out, providing shading to the living room in summer, and making a partly enclosed balcony for the main bedroom beneath the eaves. On paper, as a single-storey building with a tall pitched roof, the house is little different to the bungalow that occupied the site before, which perhaps explains why it had such an easy ride through planning. As the client, fashion designer Amanda Winship, jokes: “It’s a bungalow with a generous loft conversion.” Over in east London, the architects have applied similar spatial cunning to a radically different brief. Taking over an abandoned caretaker’s house in the grounds of Mandeville primary school in Clapton, their new Hackney School of Food is an understated beacon to the mission of healthy eating. In this deprived area with high levels of obesity, it is Marcus Rashford’s school meals campaign in architectural form. Spearheaded by a network of three local primaries and the charity Chefs in Schools, the project has seen the unlovely brick building gutted and kitted out as an educational kitchen, with bespoke height-adjustable cooking stations for kids of different ages arranged around a voluminous double-height space. As in Surbiton, the finishes have been kept raw and exposed, with traces of the old caretaker’s house left clinging to the upper walls, and the shoestring budget was spent exactly where it needed to be. One big picture window has been punched into the street-facing wall, where a playful mural by illustrator Jean Jullien announces the presence of the new community facility to the neighbourhood. Outside, a garden of raised beds is already brimming with edible plants, next to a conical brick pizza oven, recently fired up for a Halloween fundraiser. Budget allowing, a second phase will hopefully see beehives and an aquaponic greenhouse, along with a landscaped amphitheatre. “This has been one of the most rewarding projects we’ve worked on,” says Percy Weston. “We’re very keen to do more public work, where architecture can have a real social impact.” With their rare understanding of the practical art of making, with a careful economy of means, Surman Weston seem perfectly placed to make tight public budgets go a very long way.