Studio Gascoigne works with client feedback by building sign-off checkpoints into every stage of the design process, so clients shape the direction of a project from the first sketch through to the finished build rather than reacting to a single completed design at the end. It’s a structure built around one idea: design sells, and it only sells when the client’s business is properly understood at every step.
Feedback At Every Stage, Not Just The End
The studio runs projects through a five-stage design process (Preliminary Design, Concept Design, Developed Design, Detailed Design, and Implementation), and client feedback is gathered at the close of each stage before work moves forward. Nothing progresses on assumption. A retail brand, an airport tenant, or a hospitality client reviews the direction at each checkpoint and either signs off or asks for changes, and that response becomes the brief for the next stage.
This matters most at the start. Preliminary Design is where the studio tests layout, positioning, and early concepts against the client’s actual goals, and it’s the cheapest point in the whole process to change course. A shift in direction here costs a redrawn plan. The same shift caught at Detailed Design or during Implementation costs reworked drawings, delayed trades, and real money on site. Studio Gascoigne structures its feedback loops to catch the big decisions early, while they’re still just ideas on paper.
Collaboration From Brief To Build
Led by principal Mark Gascoigne, the studio’s team pairs registered architects with interior and retail designers and technicians, so client feedback gets tested against both the creative brief and the practical build constraints at the same time, not handed off between separate consultants who never talk to each other. That range shows in the client list: Air New Zealand, Glassons, Hallensteins, and Trelise Cooper on the fashion and travel side; Hayama and Popo Dumplings in hospitality; Icebreaker and Kiwi Discovery among the Auckland Airport retail tenants. Different sectors, same working method: clients stay in the loop at every checkpoint rather than being handed a finished concept and asked to accept it.
With 170+ design awards behind the studio’s work, that collaborative process is what actually gets projects to a result worth entering, not an afterthought bolted on at the end. Read more about the team’s background on the about page, or see what past clients say about working through the process on the client testimonials page.