Have a Nice Day

Nice Place

Architects & Interior Designers · London

A work of fiction — the promotional site for the novel Sycophants & Sociopaths by Paul Nelson

Bold visions, agreed centres, and finishes that photograph beautifully. We turn ambition into adaptive reuse — and the occasional structural anomaly into a feature.

Our Work Meet the Studio
The Nice Place studio — a neon HAVE A NICE DAY sign above a chaotic architecture office

The studio, on a representative morning

The Practice

Founded in London. Powered by alignment.

Nice Place is a full-service architecture and interior design practice built on a simple conviction: great buildings begin with great energy, supportive feedback, and a strong neon sign.

Our process is collaborative, iterative and — where the budget requires — philosophical. We believe in heritage, in craft, and in the quiet power of the right adjective applied early and often. We do not photograph the back of house.

Whatever the brief, our promise never changes: we make nice places, and we would like you to have a nice day.

What We Do

Four disciplines. One vocabulary.

A coordinated offer across the lifecycle of a building, from the first optimistic sketch to the press release that explains what went right.

01

Architecture

Concept to completion. Ceiling heights that perform hierarchy, corridors that widen for some bodies and narrow for others.

02

Interior Design

Materials, mood and the precise shade of beige that says “heritage” without incurring the cost of any.

03

Adaptive Reuse

We don't fix problems — we reposition them. Yesterday's defect is tomorrow's experiential destination.

04

Stakeholder Reassurance

Planning, comms and the calm, deliberate language that turns an incident into a resilience test passed.

Selected Project

The Meridian — reimagined

Flagship · The Meridian

Formerly the Astute Trading Rooms, the Meridian is our flagship adaptive-reuse scheme — and a case study in turning constraint into character.

When a shallow bowl appeared, inexplicably, in the ground-floor slab, the engineers proposed an excavation. We proposed a better question: what if we don't fix it? The result is the building's celebrated “heart.”

Structural anomaly→the building's “heart”
Sunken slab→a “sunken collaboration space”
Multi-use forum→a “youth engagement zone”
An office in disgrace→“an indoor–outdoor experiential leisure environment”
The Studio

The people who make it nice.

A small, devoted team of architects, designers and digital talent — aligned, engaged, and instructed to look it.

Founding Director

Camilla

Founded Nice Place on the belief that the right adjectives, applied early, hold any project together. Personally trained most of the studio and remembers several of their names.

Associate Architect · Operations

Delores

Keeps the studio running, the deadlines moving and the children (occasionally her own) from drawing on anything structural. The only person here who has read the contracts.

Project Architect

Eva

Joined having survived worse offices. Admires what the studio has done with the post-apocalyptic aesthetic. Fluent in load paths, planning law and the polite refusal.

Senior Architect

Omar

Leads technical delivery and rotates a small cube while thinking, which is often. Has never been over budget — a claim the studio encourages and does not examine.

Digital & Visualisation Lead

Robert

The studio's digital backbone. Networked the printer in under an hour and answers to “Robert,” “Richard,” and the general direction of the server room.

Interiors & Materials

Toby

Curates the studio's finishes and the exact swatch that reads as luxury under flattering light. Regularly asked to make the impossible look intentional.

Architectural Assistant

Isaac

In his year-out and adapting briskly to shifting priorities, of which there are many. His mug asks the question the rest of the studio is too aligned to answer.

Associate Director · Strategy

James

Manages our most valued relationships and tends to know things before they happen. What he lets the rest of the studio know is, by design, a separate matter.

Buddy (Office Morale) was unavailable for a photograph, having been exiled to the car for the duration of an investor visit.

A Brief Note

None of this is real.

There is no neon sign. There is no bowl in the slab. There is no Camilla. There is a book — and Nice Place Architects is its beating, dysfunctional heart.

Sycophants & Sociopaths book cover
The Chernov Revisions · Book One

Sycophants & Sociopaths

A novel by Paul Nelson

Alex Blackwood is fifty-nine, an architect carried through life by dry wit. He owes the world a book about his great-grandfather Ivan — a forgotten modernist who built grandeur into a society that had abolished it.

What he gets instead is Nice Place, an oligarch with a philanthropic smile, and a quiet system called Pi: a habit, a ratio, a method of shaving language down until nothing sharp is left.

“Once a product reaches its pinnacle, producers stop improving it. Instead, they lower the customer. That way regression looks like progress.”
The Chernov Revisions

One story, told in four revisions.

A tetralogy about flattery, power and the polite machinery of decline — from a London drawing board to a St Petersburg workshop a century earlier. Each volume opens with the same small lie: that the truth is in there.

Coming soonwSycophants & Sociopaths cover
Book One

Sycophants & Sociopaths

“The truth is in there.”

An architect, an oligarch and a firm that runs on flattery. Beneath the smiles, a quiet system called Pi begins to show its hand.

Coming soonLethargy & Lava cover
Book Two

Lethargy & Lava

“The truth is in here.”

A volcano, a sandcastle and the slow inertia that lets the pressure build. The firm returns, the horned beasts rise, and someone makes an exit.

Coming soonPersonality & Persuasion cover
Book Three

Personality & Persuasion

“The toast is in there.”

Brand wars at the Olympics curdle into something larger. Soft power hardens, maps are redrawn, and an invasion arrives dressed as marketing.

Coming soonThe Irrationality of Pi cover
Book Four

The Irrationality of Pi

“It's all in there.”

Old St Petersburg, a father's gift of drawing instruments, and the first circle ever drawn. Where the ratio began — and why it never balanced.

The Chernov Revisions · Paul Nelson

Start with Book One
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News on Book Two of The Chernov Revisions, plus the occasional dispatch from the studio. No spam, no alignment, no emojis from management.