nelson - our home studio

f2a's home studio sits at the edge of Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park, on the north shore of Kootenay Lake. We are here by choice. Nelson has one of the highest concentrations of artists per capita in Canada, and that is not incidental to how we work. Art, craft, nature, and a refusal to compromise on any of them. That is Nelson, and that is us.

The studio doubles as a materials laboratory. We run a sawmill on site, work with straw bale, rammed earth, and site-harvested timber, and test assemblies in the same landscape we design for. The douglas fir growing on these slopes, the mountain aggregates in these valleys, the fabrication knowledge accumulated across projects in West Africa, the Himalayas, and BC — all of it feeds back into how we design and build here. The Kootenays are not a constraint. They are the source.

For projects in the Nelson area, f2a operates as a fully integrated design+build firm. The same team that produces the drawings builds the building. We do our own excavation, mill our own timber where the project allows, and fabricate custom windows, doors, and interior features in house. Clients working with f2a locally get one point of accountability from first sketch to finished floor, fewer gaps between design intent and construction reality, and a construction team that solves problems with the authority of people who also designed the detail.

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