story
f2a was founded in 2016 at the intersection of art, craft, nature, and a stubborn refusal to separate any one of them from the others.
Austin Hawkins grew up building — treehouses from salvaged materials, motorcycles from found parts. He studied art and French, won a Watson Fellowship to build with clay and timber in the Middle East, Africa, and South America, and came back convinced that the best buildings come from people who understand making. He sought out Florian Maurer, whose spare, precise residential work had earned a reputation across the Okanagan. He worked in Florian's practice, learned his approach to form and restraint, and in 2016 they founded f2a together.
The firm was built on their shared experience as designers who could build, and the belief that design and construction are not separate disciplines but one act of creative thinking. A designer who builds details differently. They know what is structurally possible, what a connection looks like from the inside, where cost lives in a building and where it does not. The result is architecture that is simpler and more efficient, not because simplicity is an aesthetic preference, but because the people making it understand the consequences of every decision before it reaches the site.
That integration produces work that would be difficult to achieve otherwise. The Fast + Epp headquarters in Vancouver was designed by Florian with austin’s support, and built under Austin's construction management: CLT prefabrication, seismic isolation devices, electrochromic glazing, a testing frame capable of bearing 100,000 pounds. It won the AFBC Award for Innovation in 2023.
The Steeps House carries that tradition forward. Florian designed and built his own home in the Naramata hills, organizing it around a central garden. Austin designed and built his on a steep north shore site above Kootenay Lake, organizing it around the slope. The walls are straw bale, packed and plastered. The structure is site-cut Douglas fir, milled from timber felled on the property. The assembly is panelized and prefabricated, detailed with the same precision as the Fast+Epp building. Earth building knowledge acquired on three continents, brought home to the Kootenays and resolved with current technology. The house is nearing completion and will be the most complete expression of what f2a builds toward.
f2a has grown into a team of nearly a dozen designers and craftspeople who share that alignment. Architects, technologists, woodworkers, and systems specialists working across Nelson and Revelstoke. They design together, build together, and bring the same standard of thinking to a steep-site house on Kootenay Lake as to a community centre in the Himalayas. The work ranges widely. The approach adapts the fundamentals to meet the circumstances.
