Beautifulhomes, builtjust for you.
DATUM is an architecture and interiors studio with offices in California and New York. Tell us what you are dreaming of, and we will design it and build it right.
Great design is not about adding more. It is about getting the light, the space, and the flow right, so your home just feels good to live in.
Every project starts with a visit and a long talk. We learn how you want to live before we draw a single wall.
The result is calm and simple. A home that feels right on the first day, and still feels right ten years later.
Selected work, measured to the millimetre.
A small number of projects each year, seen through from the first survey to the final handover. Residences, cultural buildings, and the careful reuse of what already stands.
A small team who would rather draw it twice than build it wrong.
Founded in California in 2011, DATUM is an architecture and interiors studio working on homes and commercial spaces across the country. We keep the team small, so the people who design your project are the ones who see it built.
We start every project on site, with a tape measure and a long conversation. The drawing comes after we understand the light, the land, and how you actually want to live.
Four steps, in this order, every time.
Our method is deliberately linear. Each stage has to be true before the next one earns the right to begin.
Measure
We survey the site, the light, and the way you move through a day. Facts first. Opinions later.
Draw
Every idea is tested as a drawing before it costs a cent. We resolve the plan until it stops arguing with itself.
Build
We stay on site through construction, protecting the idea from the hundred small compromises that erode it.
Live
We return a year after you move in, to learn what the building taught us and carry it into the next one.
Vertex House
A steep north-facing plot most builders called a problem. We read it as the whole idea. The house steps down the slope in three concrete trays, each one reaching out to catch a different hour of light.
The structure is left exactly as it was poured. Nothing is clad, nothing is hidden. What holds the house up is what you see, and what you touch has been chosen to grow better with age.
They found the idea we could not name, then protected it from us for two years. We live inside that idea every single day now.
From the journal.
Short essays on the craft of building well. Written by the studio, for anyone who cares how a space actually gets made.
Have a project in mind? Let us help.
Tell us what you are dreaming of. We answer every message ourselves, within two working days.
Notes from the drawing board.
Essays on light, material, and the decisions that make a space worth living in. No trends, no jargon. Just the thinking behind the work.
Let us talk about your project.
Whether you have land, a home to remodel, or just an idea, we would love to hear it. Every message reaches a director, not an inbox.