I’ve thought about this a lot.
For a long time I felt almost shy about it. Three people. I’d say it and wait for the reaction, like the number needed defending.
I don’t feel that way anymore. I’m proud of it now. Proud of what three people can actually build and deliver.
The question I still get, all the time: “Why don’t you grow? You’ve been doing this 27 years.”
I could have. I chose not to. And it took an expensive lesson to understand why that was the right call.
____________________
At my previous studio, we were a partnership. Several good projects came in at the same time and we did what most studios do. We hired. More designers, more admin, more overhead.
Then the pipeline slowed. That’s the nature of high-end residential. Projects are long, referrals are unpredictable, the gap between a signed contract and real cashflow can stretch for months. We were carrying a team built for a peak that didn’t last.
The overhead didn’t flex. The work did.
You learn what a business actually costs when you can’t cover it. That lesson stays with you.
____________________
When I set up Studio SuCo, I built it differently.
Three of us.
Sahad has been alongside me for ten years. He came with me from the previous studio. Started in drafting, now runs everything visual: 3D modelling, renders, drawing sets that take a design from concept to something a contractor can actually build from. He knows how I think before I’ve said it.
Mira has been with us for four years. She runs everything that isn’t the design: suppliers, deliveries, accounts, payments. She’s the reason I can be in a client meeting or on site and know the back of house is moving. Without her, I’d be doing both jobs. Neither well, I know from experience.
The tagline on our profile says it plainly: “Together long enough to know what every project needs without having to ask.” That’s not marketing. It’s just what happens when you don’t churn people.
____________________
A small team only works if the people in it are very good and very aligned. Sahad and Mira aren’t people I manage. They’re people I trust completely. That changes everything.
No briefing overhead. No version control on understanding. When something needs to happen, it happens because we all already know the standard.
My role is client relations, design, and being actually hands-on across every project. Not oversight. Actual ownership. The cohesion between trades, suppliers, and installers doesn’t happen on its own. It happens because I’m in it.
We run two to four projects at any time, never more. I review everything before it leaves the studio. Not as a micromanager. As a standard.
That would be impossible at scale. The thing that makes the work good and the clients happy is the thing that doesn’t scale.
____________________
The market has waves. In residential, it always has. But nothing teaches you about how those waves actually feel like Covid does. Or floods. Or regional tensions that put everyone in a holding pattern for months.
You adjust. You move past it. But how fast, and how cleanly, depends entirely on how you’re built.
Small means you can ride the waves instead of being swallowed by them. A quiet stretch isn’t a crisis when your overhead is calibrated for it. That resilience is worth more to me than the upside of a bigger team in a boom quarter.
____________________
The honest trade-off: staying small is a choice to limit volume in exchange for continuity.
We won’t take every project that comes through the door. We don’t want to. A bad fit at this level costs everyone.
What small makes possible is that every client gets the actual thing. Not a version of it run by a junior with my name on the front.
I’ve watched studios get very good at winning work, then deliver a version of the same project on repeat. The same signature stamped onto every client, every brief, every space. Growth becomes the strategy. The client becomes the variable.
For us it’s the other way around.
____________________
Something I don’t talk about enough: where the work actually comes from.
People assume that without a room full of other designers to bounce things off, you’re creatively limited. It’s the opposite.
I draw from nature constantly. Clients are the other big source. Long conversations about how they actually live almost always lead somewhere more interesting than anything I’d have arrived at on my own.
But some of my best creative moments have come from constraints I didn’t choose.
A client gives me a strict limit. Maybe there’s a piece they’re completely attached to, something sentimental, something I would never have suggested. It has to go in the space. Non-negotiable. And suddenly my job is to make it work anyway.
Those moments push me in ways an open brief never does. There’s something about a hard constraint that forces a more honest solution. You stop reaching for the obvious answer and start actually solving the problem.
The spaces that have surprised me most? Almost all of them had a moment like that somewhere in them.
____________________
I’m not arguing everyone should do this. Some studios scale well. Some clients need a larger operation.
This is the bet I made. After 27 years, 18 of them in the UAE, it’s still the right one.
Three people. The right three. That’s the circle.
