In the second episode of Design Leadership in the Boardroom, we’re joined by Christophe Egret — visionary architect, artist, and co-founder of Studio Egret West, to explore how creativity, spirituality, and leadership come together to shape cities and the people who build them.
This episode dives into architecture with soul, exploring what it means to build meaningful spaces, lead with empathy, and balance creative vision with commercial success.
Watch the full interview or read or top 5 insights below.
The conversation in architecture has become obsessed with what can be measured: units, profit and value engineering. But the best leaders know that the immeasurable is what makes a place alive.
Christophe thinks the real goal of architecture and urbanism isn’t efficiency, it’s enrichment. To make the world better through joy, health, and connection. That begins with what he calls the inner side: the soul, coherence, community, and culture that should shape everything we build. When we design from the inside out, the outer form naturally follows, and the result is not just a building, but a good place.
In Studio Egret West, they anchor projects in timeless principles. For example, they would dedicate “the first three storeys to the public,” or believed that “every roof should hold a garden.” These ideas become the moral architecture of their projects.
How do you explain the importance of the soul to the stakeholders? To bridge the soulful and the commercial, leaders should communicate like visionaries.
Christophe champions the power of the hand-drawn line. Sketches keep a project open to possibilities while CGIs shut it down. A sketch invites dialogue, discovery, and dissent. A render ends the story.
Storytelling is the other half of the craft. Don’t speak in blueprints, speak in stories. A developer is a human who can empathise with a story. Tell them about an open square where children can play and commuters can cut through on their way home, or about a bench where neighbours can meet. Stories move hearts, and moving hearts move projects.
Soul is important to consider when building cities, and also within business itself. As your company grows, it can be difficult to continue practices that bring people together.
To maintain the soul in the company, it’s important that people can see it and feel it. Christophe explained that at Studio Egret West, the studio wasn’t just a glass box; it was open and public — from a bright yellow table in the middle of the main space where people can go to sketch or talk to others, to picking the right music that aligned with the time of day to create the right ambience.
By thinking about these things, people can enter the space and immediately feel the soul radiating throughout the studio.
Great leaders invest in curiosity as deliberately as they invest in payroll. Because clients don’t just buy competence, they buy conviction.
At Studio Egret West, thought leadership was a part of strategy. Three times a year, the team would pick a subject, e.g., the future of the high street, the future of car parks, and treat it like client work. They built exhibitions, wrote manifestos, and invited the world in. It wasn’t cheap, but it was priceless:
Artificial intelligence will soon automate the technical: coordination, materials, and scheduling. What it can’t automate is the human: soul, playfulness, dreaming, ritual, and wonder.
That’s where creative leadership belongs.
The modern architect, and every creative leader, must be the interpreter between systems and souls; between what the city needs and what the citizen feels. That means pushing the envelope gently but persistently — fewer car parks, more bicycles; less ownership, more sharing.
Christophe is one of the UK’s most respected architects and urban thinkers. As co-founder of Studio Egret West, he has helped redefine placemaking through landmark projects such as Mayfield Park in Manchester, Clapham Library, and the Earl’s Court Masterplan. Known for blending architecture, landscape, and urban design into a seamless practice, Christoph brings a deep sense of spirituality and purpose to his work. Today, through his new platform Soul in the City, he explores how the emotional and spiritual dimensions of urban life can inspire more connected, human-centered cities.
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