Alessandro Caruso Architects and Interiors Ltd is celebrating 10 years this year. Sam Hawcroft talks to founders Alex and Amelia about their journey so far…
Growing up, architecture was all Sicilian-born Alessandro Caruso ever knew. He was steeped in his father’s family business from an early age and, later in his life, he’d often meet people who remembered him as a child playing on construction sites.
Not surprisingly, this sparked his passion for the industry – and he sought to follow in his father’s footsteps. But it was while he was at university in Palermo that a serious motorbike accident forced him to halt his studies for more than a year.
During long hours confined to a hospital bed, Alex began to foster what he calls “a genuine interest in healing architecture” – how one’s surroundings can be as crucial to recovery as medication. It gave him the opportunity to gain invaluable insights from the health professionals treating him, too.
After he eventually completed his degree, Alex went to work on a part-EU-funded architectural placement in Madrid – which is where he met his future wife and business partner, Amelia. However, they were only together about nine days before he had to return to Sicily, so the pair were in a long-distance relationship for about 18 months before Amelia decided to relocate to Sicily.
As much as she loved the island, she struggled to find permanent work there, so, in 2001, the couple decided to try moving to England for a month to see how things went. Alex sent his CV around architectural practices around the country, from London to Bristol and Glasgow – but the first job offer he received was from a Hull architectural firm.
This was somewhat ironic for Amelia – born in Hull, she’d grown up in Doncaster before returning to her home city to study at the University of Hull. She says she’d been “quite looking forward to going somewhere different” with Alex, but acknowledges that the city has a way of drawing you back… again and again.
The couple had a three-year spell in Darlington, County Durham, but Hull came calling once more when Alex was invited to become a partner at his old firm. This was, he says, as close as could be to having your own business – but as time went on, he increasingly felt the need to strike out on his own. He needed more freedom of expression, or “space to dream”, as he puts it.
This was news to Amelia, though. “We had just broken up for Christmas and I had a glass of wine in my hand. I nearly dropped it when Alex said, ‘We need to start up our own company.’”
Thus Alessandro Caruso Architects (ACA) was born around their dining-room table at the beginning of 2014. At the time, the couple had two young children, and because Amelia was only working part-time and Alex already had his previous shareholder loan to pay back, they were unable to apply for any additional finance. The two-week holiday they’d booked in America was cancelled – and they ploughed “every penny” of their life savings into the venture.
“Everything just seemed like obstacle after obstacle,” says Amelia. “We borrowed a little bit of money from both our parents and at one point we thought that we were going have to sell the house, move schools and disrupt the kids. We went nine months without taking any money, and just lived off our savings. It wasn’t until the November that we took our first wage. There were a lot of challenges that first year.”
After the first six months, though, Alex “wavered” and, in search of financial security, he began to explore employment with other practices. He had a couple of interviews for senior positions – but he could never quite find the “courage” to tell his potential employers that he was going to drop his own business. “I told them my practice would keep going, no matter what,” he says. “I didn’t feel that I could be anything but honest about that. I think those nine months were a way to test our willingness to go ahead and try to make this work.”
It was also a test of their relationship, adds Amelia. “Everything I’d done up to that point was teaching, so I had to jump into a completely different industry. I knew nothing other than being married to an architect, and I felt like an imposter because I didn’t know enough about the industry. It was almost like when we’d first met and had that 18-month long-distance relationship – we could easily have given up and said, this is not going to work.”
Another challenge was the retirement clause from Alex’s previous practice, meaning he had to seek work outside of Hull, but this worked in his favour, as his name started to become known more widely because of his specialism in healthcare.
“This gave me the opportunity to go and talk to people I had not talked to before,” he says. “The specialism in mental health and dementia was always there, and it allowed us to build on that. Over the past 10 years, the challenge of competition has always been able to be overcome by focusing on research and development.
“One of the first projects we got involved with was an extra care development with patients that had various degrees of dementia. We worked through all the research we had come across. I was an associate of the University of Stirling at the time, and as we developed the full package for the client, we were then able to share the knowledge we had gained at a number of conferences – which further solidified our position as a specialist that could be accessed more for the knowledge that we could bring to the table than for the competitiveness of our fees.”
ACA’s design for the multi-award-winning Allam Diabetes Centre in Hull was to really put them on the map in the industry – and it turns out that the late Dr Assem Allam literally had a hand in it.
“That’s a fantastic story,” says Alex. “We were one of four practices invited to tender but we came second, losing out to a practice outside the area without the health specialism but with a 100-plus staff count. But as the initial design developed, Dr Allam wasn’t happy with what was being offered, so we were called in by the Trust to see whether we were able to satisfy his aspirations.
“When I first sat down with him, there was an immediate spark of energy. I was sketching out some ideas – as I usually do – and at one point Dr Allam asked me for the pen. Both of us started playing with sketches and bouncing ideas back and forth. It worked really well.
“We already had an established relationship with the Trust, and it was just a matter of developing that. And, like most of our projects, it was the relationship that made the difference. And in this case the benefactor was instrumental in the project – Dr Allam wanted it to be a world-class building in a prime position, the main artery going into Hull Royal Infirmary.”
The Allam Diabetes Centre has generated more interest in ACA locally, too, adds Amelia. “Although we were used to delivering that kind of scale of project outside Hull, whenever there was a prestigious project to be designed in Hull, there was a tendency for clients to straightaway look for architectural practices in Sheffield, Leeds, or beyond, and not within the city. But now we’ve proved that there is a local, talented option.”
ACA works on projects of all sizes from small hospital ward refurbishments costing £50,000 to large-scale, multimillion-pound projects such as its latest design for a new £19m Community Diagnostic Centre in Scunthorpe, which won a World Design Award in 2023 before it had even been built. “It’s more about our passion and wanting to change something for the better, rather than the size of the project,” says Amelia.
They have recently begun to diversify into business interiors, which draws on the company’s founding principles – how a person’s surroundings can affect their wellbeing.
“We spend about 80% of our time indoors,” adds Amelia. “People are willing to spend an hour to go to a spa, for example, to boost their wellbeing, but they don’t consider the environment that they’re in for 12 hours a day, and the massive impact that can have.”
To that end, the company now has two brands, Alessandro Caruso Architects and Alessandro Caruso Interiors, and it has some “exciting” projects in the pipeline involving local businesses.
“The collaboration and the passion for the design is what interests us,” says Alex. “We’re not designing a building – we’re designing an experience.” In addition to a number of projects at various stages for the healthcare sector, the latest projects on ACA’s drawing boards are the interior design for a commercial office and a VIP lounge refurbishment in a local arena. The team is also working on South Hunsley School in partnership with Helix to design and build a new teaching block.
The pair pride themselves on diversity, another founding principle. Most of ACA’s team of experienced architects, designers, technicians and project managers joined as students with a variety of backgrounds, and over the years Alex and Amelia have worked with apprentices from Italy, Poland, Pakistan, India and the Middle East as well as the UK.
The company also strives to be at the forefront of technology, using virtual reality to offer a “full, immersive” experience to clients. They also want to embrace AI (artificial intelligence), a technology many fear – but it’s about using it to your advantage, says Alex.
“Way before the pandemic, we were using technology to assist with our projects and we would like to see the practice growing with that emphasis on research while continuing to build up the technology. VR is one, and AI is another that we are exploring. One thing I’m certain of, with any technology, is that we will always remain in control.”
ACA has certainly come a long way from that dining-room table a decade ago – and as technology continues to advance, Alex and Amelia are now excitedly looking ahead to what the next 10 years will bring.
