Designed with intent
- Jul 21
- 4 min read
Words by Hannah Tapping
A practice shaping homes and businesses with sustainability and circular economy practices stitched into every layer.
Boaz Studio’s founder, Stephen Tozer, took a sideways step into interior design aged 40. Leaving a career in marketing to retrain, he opened Boaz in 2018, inspired by his award-winning final project at Falmouth University. Graduating alongside Stephen, Alice Nightingale joined soon after, recognising a similar instinct in each other’s designs. “A sustainable ethos ran through all of our projects and it was this commonality that brought us together to form the practice,” explains Stephen. This instinct has become the studio’s spine, formalised in B Corp certification, a process that has very much broadened what sustainability means to them both.
Early on, the focus sat squarely on material: specifying finishes that were circular, ensuring nothing from a site ended up in landfill. Since B Corp, the lens has widened from carbon footprint and where they bank, to the systems behind the studio as much as the products within it. That thinking plays out differently depending on the brief. On commercial projects, regulations can leave little room for manoeuvre, Stephen explains: “We might be required to use a cladding that is itself a kind of plastic, so we compensate then wherever we can: recyclable flooring throughout, recyclable fabrics on every piece of seating.”
Alice adds a second layer to the same principle, one rooted closer to home: sourcing as locally as possible, building relationships with makers rather than simply placing orders from online catalogues, because proximity cuts mileage and keeps a project connected to the place it serves. Bespoke furniture and lighting now all come from a small, trusted network within roughly 25 miles of the studio. That refusal to default to a catalogue is, in many ways, the whole philosophy. Boaz proudly has no ‘house style’, so motifs are not repeated from project to project. Instead, each scheme is drawn out from its site and its occupants. “If the project is very historical, then we look for influences there,” Alice explains. “We look at the location and draw inspiration from that, as well as trying to combine beauty and aesthetics with well-being and sustainability, giving both the project and the client a strong connection to its location.” Stephen refers to this approach as giving a project a sense of place, grounding it rather than imposing on it.
This tailoring stretches across two very different worlds. On the residential side, the studio designs around how a family actually wants to live, working closely enough that the relationship becomes, in Stephen’s words, “a genuine working partnership built on trust.” Commercial work asks something else entirely. Designing a premium retail space for a golf resort meant thinking in terms of a specific demographic; turning to a paediatric emergency department for five- to fifteen-year-olds meant thinking instead about engagement, colour and neurodivergence, balancing spaces that needed stimulation against those that needed calm. “Ultimately, it comes down to knowing the user,” Stephen says simply. The studio’s current project, a conference centre, coffee shop and co-working draws on every part of that thinking at once: healthy-building principles, biophilic design and materials chosen as carefully as if the building were a home.
The process behind each project is unusually disciplined for two designers who clearly relish variety. Work follows defined stages, from initial brief and on-site visit through concept design, where mood boards and 3D sketches help clients visualise their project. From there, designs develop into specified paint colours, fabrics and furniture, then into full technical drawings: joinery details, reflective ceiling and lighting plans, wall elevations and exhaustive furniture and fittings schedules record not just dimensions but the sustainable credentials behind every item specified. “These schedules double as a long-term record for the client,” explains Alice, “something to return to years later if pieces need replacing or a buyback scheme comes into play.”
The studio sees projects through to fit-out and snagging too, often on site themselves, staging finished spaces for photography and chasing down anything that has arrived damaged or incomplete. More recently, that remit has stretched further still, into bespoke wallpapers, large-scale murals and branding work for clients, designed always in service of the interior rather than as a separate discipline.
Asked what design means to them personally, both answers carry more weight than the question perhaps intended. For Stephen, it is the creative restlessness a corporate career never gave him: “my brain never switches off from creativity now, which I wasn’t getting before in corporate jobs.” For Alice, it is closer to care, the chance to shape how people feel inside a space, whether that is helping someone fall in love with their own home or making an office work harder for the people who spend their days in it. “If it’s good for the people and good for the environment, it’s good for everyone’s future,” she says. It is, in the end, a studio built on exactly that combination: beauty held to account by sustainability and design pulled as close to its place and its people as it can possibly get.
