Speakers

Chris provides 16+ years’ experience. As a design director he contributes a broad strategic expertise from across AKT II’s global retrofit portfolio: from the unprecedented restoration at Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings, and the forthcoming retrofit of London’s Cambridge House Hotel on Piccadilly and New Zealand House in St. James’s with The Crown Estate.

In western England, Chris has overseen the transformative heritage regeneration at Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings: the world’s first iron-framed building. The project has received a plethora of awards, including the prestigious European Heritage Europa Nosta Award in Conservation and Adaptive Reuse. Here in London, Chris has been running and supporting The Crown Estate’s, New Zealand House transformation project. Chris has instilled in the design team the need to work with the existing structure over his eight years on the project, which has led to less than 10% of the structure needing remodelling, while still delivering a rejuvenated first class building. On Piccadilly, Chris has championed the redevelopment of the listed old In and Out Club, into the forthcoming Cambridge House Hotel, where the 1760’s villa, once home to one of our past Prime Minister’s will be converted into London’s next boutique hotel. As the hotel sits next to the Piccadilly Line, a complex scheme of acoustic isolation was drawn up where the Grade I and Grade II buildings all now float on over 550 bearings. Most recently, Chris has had a hand in contributing to the transformation of the former Ku Klux Klan auditorium in Fort Worth, Texas, where repurposing a monument to hate will become a beacon of truth-telling, reparative justice, and liberation.

Across all these varied contexts, he’s been championing the maximum reuse of each site’s existing structure – applying a ‘first principles’ approach – to help drive a unified AEC response to the climate crisis. This approach has earned Chris a spot on Buildings 40 under 40 list in 2025.