McLean Quinlan

I have been lucky enough to work with Fiona on a number of diverse projects – personally and through business. No matter the scale and nature of the project, Fiona is fantastic at finding innovative and inspiring ways both to create truly beautiful buildings from scratch, and to transform existing buildings into works of art, whilst always working with the end-user of the building and the environment at the forefront of her designs. Fiona’s exquisite eye for design detail is coupled with a holistic and sympathetic approach to the building, the environment and the materials that she uses. Fiona consistently excels and is also an absolute pleasure and inspiration to work with. I can't wait for our next project together.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Mclean QUinlan. i used then 20 years ago when we were in London and recently they designed an extension to our house in Dorset. They are a dream team and look after you every step of the way. Innovative, brilliantly creative, efficient, calm and happy to help you with interiors as well as the design. Hugely supportive and always ready to find a solution around any problems, i look forward to working with them again.

We first hired Fiona Mclean in 1997 to turn our old Edwardian house into a very special home to raise our family. When we met her we clicked immediately and she answered our brief perfectly. In all these years the house has been an extraordinary place to live. 11 years later we move abroad and rented our house out, when we returned in 2012 we again hired Fiona this time with new blood in Al and Kate who refreshed the parts of the house which had suffered under the rental and they brought some fresh thinking whilst keeping the essence of the design. When people visit our house today they presume it must have been designed a couple of years ago, and this is a testament to outstanding creative thinking which has made our house a unique home. We couldn't recommend this team highly enough!!

We are very pleased about our decision to appoint McLean Quinlan as architects to what turned out to be an exciting and rewarding building project. Fiona is undoubtedly an outstanding architect. The house she designed for us is characterised by beautiful, clean lines and great simplicity – entirely devoid of clutter and architectural “noise”. She has a great awareness of space, and succeeded in creating very generous, almost minimalist, living areas that nevertheless exude comfort and warmth. Fiona has exquisite taste and style and, not surprisingly, she is exceptionally good at understanding and choosing colours, textures and materials. Our house is a calm space and full of light, which flows very well and is an absolute pleasure to live in. Building one’s own home can be an enjoyable but at times highly stressful undertaking. Fiona is great at bringing a sense of calm, unflustered determination to the project, and has outstanding people skills. She has a brilliant way of never treating your ideas in a dismissive or disrespectful manner, but still, almost invariably, finding a highly diplomatic way of convincing you that her idea is the better of the available alternatives. Her warm personality, more than anything else, contributed so much to making our project such an enjoyable one. In the light of the very positive experience of working with McLean Quinlan on our house, it was an easy decision to again commission them three years later to refurbish and significantly extend our stable block and related courtyard. Kate has transformed what used to be a bit of an eyesore into a beautiful and functional collection of buildings through imaginative design and use materials.

We worked with Fiona Mclean of Mclean Quinlan on our houses in London and Santa Barbara, California, both of which she utterly transformed in ways we couldn't even have imagined. Fiona is simply the best architect we have ever come across. Her aesthetic is utterly modern but the spaces she creates have a classic simplicity which makes them seem as fresh today as they did on the first day we walked into them. We only wish we could buy more houses just so we could work with her again. “

Starting with a brand new glazed box in a brand new development in Wandsworth Riverside Quarter, Fiona from McLean Quinlan designed a slick purpose built gallery. She carefully took into consideration our budget and cleverly created designs which gave us a gallery and office space. On a design only basis, she was always on hand to advise with queries that arose during the construction. A very good experience and a light and airy, stylish product.