Four to six commissions a year, in stone, iron, bronze, weathering steel and timber. Everything here — the stages, the durations, the weight limits, the money — is what we would tell you on the phone anyway.
A commission is a promise about the next fifty years, not the next fifty days.
We take on a small number of commissions each year because each one is made by one person from rough form to final surface, and because the studio will not quote a date it cannot hold. What follows is the whole process, including the parts most studios leave until the contract.
Permanent works for publicly accessible sites — squares, parks, riversides, hospital grounds and school campuses, usually procured through a local authority or a developer’s section 106 obligation.
Single works for gardens, courtyards and interiors, commissioned directly or through an advisor. Discretion is standard; we photograph for the archive but publish nothing without written consent.
Thresholds, seats, sills, stair treads, hearths and clad elements that are part of a building rather than placed in front of one. Delivered to RIBA stages alongside the design team.
Small editions produced with a gallery for an exhibition or fair, typically between three and nine pieces, with edition records kept by the studio registrar.
Saying this early saves everyone a month. None of it is a judgement on the work — it is a judgement on whether this studio would do it well.
The five things that let us give a real answer instead of a range. Most enquiries arrive with two of them, which is fine — we work the rest out together on the first call.
Send these to studio@monolith-works.com and you will have a reply within three working days.
A call or a visit to the yard. We want to hear the site, the budget band and the date before we hear the idea — those three things decide whether the rest of the process is honest. If we are not the right studio, we say so on this call and, where we can, name someone who is.
Anneke or Dashiell attends the site with a laser measure, a moisture meter and a camera. We record levels, access widths, gate heights, overhead cables, ground make-up and where the sun falls at 9am and 4pm. For anything going on soft ground we ask for a trial pit or an existing ground investigation report.
Two or three directions on paper, narrowed to one, then built at full scale in a cheaper stand-in material — usually jelutong, plywood or unreinforced site-mix concrete. Nothing is signed off from a render. A maquette stands in the yard through at least one weekend of weather before anyone approves it.
Block selection happens in person at the quarry or the foundry — grain, vein and flaw are chosen, not specified. Fabrication then runs continuously with one named maker from rough form to final tolerance check. Clients are welcome in the yard at any point with a day’s notice; most come twice.
Grinding, honing, waxing or controlled oxidation, depending on the material. Weathering steel and unsealed iron are stood outside in the yard until the surface has settled; we do not accelerate a patina chemically, because it never matches what the weather does. Outdoor patination is suspended between November and February.
Our own crew delivers and sets every major work. Deliveries run on a 7.5-tonne flatbed with a lorry-mounted crane from Rainham; anything over 3,500 kg moves on an 18-tonne wagon with a documented lift plan. We supply method statements, RAMS, the lift plan and proof of insurance a fortnight before we arrive.
Every commission is handed over with a maintenance sheet written for that specific piece and that specific site. The twelve-month inspection is included in the commission fee. After that, inspection visits are charged at £480 to £1,600 depending on distance and access, and we keep the record in the studio archive for the life of the work.
Durations overlap. A commission that runs seven months has not skipped a stage; it has run fabrication and finishing across the same weeks, which is only possible for work under about 800 kg.
Six materials are in active commission use. The limits below are the studio’s own — gantry capacity, saw bed, kiln volume, foundry crucible — not the limits of the material. Where a piece exceeds them we fabricate in sections and joint on site, and we tell you that at the concept stage rather than at week twenty.
| Quarried stone | Blocks to 2,800 kg. Diamond wire saw bed 2,400 × 1,400 mm. Basalt, limestone and granite; sourced from UK, Portuguese and Icelandic quarries and selected in person. |
| Cast concrete | Single continuous pour to 4,500 kg, maximum span 3,600 mm. Formwork built in-house from planed spruce and used once. Pours suspended when yard temperature falls below 5°C. |
| Cast iron | Largest single casting 1,400 kg, poured with our foundry partner in Sheffield. Sand moulds are single-use, so a failed pour costs four weeks, not four days. |
| Cast bronze | Lost-wax to 600 kg per element. Larger forms are cast in sections and welded, with the seam either dressed out or left legible — a decision made at maquette stage. |
| Weathering steel | Plate to 25 mm. Welded assemblies to 4,200 mm tall and 2,000 kg. Fabricated to BS EN 1090 execution class 2, higher where the engineer requires it. |
| Timber | Air-dried English and European white oak, sections to 400 × 400 mm and 3,000 mm long. Used as cradle, base and counterweight rather than as a finish. |
Weight is the part of a commission that most often changes the design, and it is almost always decided by the route in rather than the object itself.
Tell us the gate width before you tell us the idea.— Dashiell Ortu, Studio Director
All figures are in pounds sterling and exclude VAT at the prevailing UK rate. They are honest mid-points rather than a price list: material choice moves a commission within a band, and access moves it between them.
A single studio-scale work under 150 kg for an interior — a cast or carved object on a plinth, or a wall-fixed element. One material, no site works, no craneage.
A single work to roughly 800 kg, sited outdoors in a private garden or in a commercial lobby. The most common band the studio works in, and the one most private commissions land at.
Work to about 2,500 kg forming part of a building or landscape scheme — a threshold, a seat, a clad element, a column. Engineered, calculated and signed off.
Multi-element public art, civic seating schemes and permanent commissions on publicly accessible land, typically funded through a section 106 agreement or a capital arts budget.
Payment runs 30% at design freeze, 40% at the start of fabrication, 30% on completion of installation. Full terms of business are issued with the proposal and sit alongside the site terms.
The studio is currently taking commissions for delivery from spring 2027. Two slots in the £20,000 – £60,000 band remain in the autumn 2027 programme; the architectural programme for 2027 is closed and we are quoting into 2028.
| Reply to enquiry | 3 working days |
| First conversation | Within 2 weeks |
| Site visit | 2 – 3 weeks after the call |
| Written proposal | 2 weeks after the visit |
| Interior work, under 150 kg | 4 – 6 months total |
| Garden scale, under 800 kg | 7 – 10 months total |
| Architectural, to 2,500 kg | 11 – 14 months total |
| Public art, multi-element | 18 – 30 months total |
Three things account for nearly every schedule slip the studio has had in fifteen years, and none of them are surprises if they are named at the start.
A design freeze date is agreed in writing at stage three. After that, changes are quoted as variations — not to be difficult, but because a block already cut cannot be uncut.
Britain is a poor climate for permanence and an excellent one for weathering, which is most of why the studio is here. The threats are specific and they are all solvable at the design stage: water sitting in a horizontal joint and freezing; driving rain off the south-west arriving with enough force to push moisture uphill through a bed joint; road salt thrown from a gritted carriageway within about ten metres; urban sulphates dulling limestone; and ground water wicking up through an unbroken stone base.
So we detail for it. Every stone base sits on a damp-proof isolation layer rather than directly on a slab. Every fixing into stone is A4 stainless or non-ferrous — mild steel dowels rust, expand and split the stone they were meant to hold, and we have been called out to repair other people’s. Horizontal surfaces are given a fall of one in eighty so water leaves rather than pools. Where a work will run rust deliberately, we ask the landscape designer to keep pale paving out of the wash-off zone, because the staining is permanent and it is easier to move the paving than to argue with the weather afterwards.
Freestanding sculpture in a private garden can sometimes proceed under permitted development, but the allowances are tighter than most people assume: generally 2.5 m maximum height within two metres of a boundary, and 4 m elsewhere, with the whole allowance removed by an Article 4 direction.
Anything on publicly accessible land, on a commercial site, or in a conservation area needs express permission from the local planning authority under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Householder applications run eight weeks, majors thirteen. We prepare elevations, a site plan at 1:200, a design and access statement and a materials schedule as part of the commission; the application itself is made in your name.
If a work is fixed to, set within the curtilage of, or affects the setting of a listed building, listed building consent is required under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990. It is a criminal offence to proceed without it, and the studio will not install on a listed structure until consent is granted and we have seen the decision notice.
On scheduled monuments, scheduled monument consent comes from Historic England, and on Greater London sites the local conservation officer is usually worth a pre-application conversation. We attend those meetings. Fixings into historic fabric are designed to be fully reversible, in non-ferrous metal and lime-based bedding, so the building can be returned to its previous state.
Any work over 500 kg, over two metres tall, or intended to be sat on, climbed on or leaned against is signed off by a consulting structural engineer before fabrication starts. Calculations cover overturning and sliding, wind loading to BS EN 1991-1-4, foundation bearing and, on podium decks, punching shear.
Steel fabrication is executed to BS EN 1090 with UKCA declaration of performance where the work is a construction product. For publicly accessible installations we commission an independent category 3 design check, and the client is handed a signed calculation pack, an operation and maintenance manual and the as-built drawings at completion.
Commission enquiries are read by Dashiell Ortu and answered within three working days, every one of them personally. There is no form you have to use — an email with a photograph of the site and a rough budget band is genuinely the fastest way to get a real answer.
Open the enquiry formAnything you send is used only to answer your enquiry — see the privacy notice.
Registered in England 07742118. More on the practice, the people and the materials library on the studio page.
The harder the access, the older the building and the wetter the ground, the more interested we tend to be. Tell us what you are working with.
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