Purposely Built

The story behind our rebrand.

There's a rule in design that's easy to forget once you're deep in project palettes, floorplans, client emails and furniture selection: nothing built for everyone works for anyone. The best interiors are built around specific lives and specific ways of living, and the best brand works the same way.

We approached AJS's new identity the same way we approach a client's home: not to appeal to the widest possible audience, but built around the specific work we do, the people we do it for, and the belief that good design connects the two. In our own language, it's form and function with a little bit of play. You could even say it’s purposely built.

So who is AJS for now? We're a deliberately small studio, boutique in the truest sense, with few hands on any given project. We work on single-family homes with architectural bones worth building on; whether that's a post and beam, a mid-century, or a heritage home with character worth honouring. Our projects are spread across the North Shore, the Westside, UBC, out toward Anmore and Belcarra, and the occasional island. And we're far more interested in renovations than new builds, because there's more of a story in marrying what a home already is with what it can become.

Our clients tend to be in the home they'll live in for the long run, often close to retirement or newly there. They've been through a renovation before, know what it takes, and have moved past the phase of doing things fast and cheap. They use colour meaningfully, whether that shows up in a kitchen, stair runner or painted walls. They trust our process and let us lead. They know a good renovation involves questions as intimate as the height of a toilet seat or which side you reach for the toilet paper, and they let us ask.

One project we're loving right now is a suburban house our clients themselves nicknamed a McMansion. From the outside, it looks like a familiar 1990s two-story, and from the inside, it's quietly becoming something closer to an art gallery. That kind of transformation, where the exterior almost becomes camouflage for what you've built behind it, is exactly the work we want to be doing more of.

The flip side of a sharp yes is a clear no. We're not the studio for a fifteen-hour furniture-rearrange, or for a full condo done for two hundred thousand, or for the client who wants us to copy a kitchen from the website exactly. There's a version of design help that's fine work but not our version, and part of the point of this rebrand is to say that out loud.

The brand itself carries the same balance the work does. The font is architectural, with clean lines softened by curved edges, nothing frivolous or scripty, and meant to hold up in ten years the way we hope our best work does. The colour is a different story, and we want to be honest about that. It's very now, unapologetically of its moment, and in three years we may want to change it. The pink that dominated design for the past seven or eight years eventually cycled out too, and colour has always moved that way. What we're doing with our own isn't chasing a trend, exactly. It's leaning into the current flavour, knowing full well that flavours change.

That's the mix we're after: the discipline of the font paired with a colour that's confident enough to be of its moment. Timeless where it counts, current where it can be, and confident enough to know the difference.

The right client tends to recognize themselves. That's part of the point.