The four o'clock test
Most rooms are designed for noon and photographed at golden hour. We check them at four in the afternoon in November, when a room has nowhere to hide.
Mara founded STRATA in 2012 after a decade spent between Lagos, Lisbon and Copenhagen, working on housing, cultural buildings and the slow business of adaptive reuse.
Her interest is structural rather than stylistic: how a plan handles daylight through a whole year, where a building should be heavy and where it should be light, and what a threshold does to the way people move. She leads the studio’s residential and cultural work and teaches a materials seminar each spring.
A note on this site: STRATA Studio is a concept portfolio. The people, projects and claims on these pages were written to demonstrate the design system.