Founded in 2002 by award-winning architects Amir Sanei and Abigail Hopkins, Sanei Hopkins Architects is a design-led practice with over 25 years of experience delivering thoughtful, innovative, and sustainable architecture. We approach each project with fresh eyes, combining creative imagination with rational logic to craft diverse solutions that meet our clients’ aspirations and contribute to a more sustainable future. Known for our willingness to embrace challenges and resist compromise, their work has been recognised both nationally and internationally, including selection for UK 40 under 40 and Europe 40 under 40.
Abigail Hopkins
BA(hons) MArch(Columbia) ARB RIBA
Abigail Hopkins studied Architecture at Columbia University, New York. After a spell in New York working for Richard Meier on the John Paul Getty Centre in LA, she returned to London in 1996 to work at Michael Hopkins and Partners. She set up Sanei Hopkins Architects with Amir Sanei in 2002.
Amir Sanei
AA dipl(hons), MA(hons), ARB, RIBA. RIAS
Amir Sanei graduated from the Architectural Association with Honours. He has been an international competition judge, has taught an lectured at the AA, RCA and school of architecture in Graz, was a member of the 2008 RIBA awards judging team and is currently a member of the of the Suffolk Design Review Panel
Talk subject: Housestead
Housestead is a self-build, family-led project located in the Suffolk Coast & Heaths AONB, conceived both as a home and as a prototype for sustainable rural living. The design responds to its sensitive context by re-using a derelict lodge site and reinstating a lost woodland edge, embedding the architecture in a programme of ecological regeneration.
The house is organised as a cruciform cluster of four distinct volumes—Living, Sleeping, Working and Utility—linked by outdoor spaces. This arrangement reinterprets traditional farmstead typologies, while also offering a replicable model where architecture, landscape and energy systems work as one. Passive design, on-site renewable generation, reclaimed and locally sourced materials, and long-life adaptability reduce both operational and embodied carbon.
As a development model, Housestead demonstrates how the NPPF can be leveraged to deliver exceptional quality design in rural areas. More importantly, it proposes a pattern for rural development that combines:
• multi-generational living and working,
• a landscape-first approach,
• low-impact construction and circular use of resources, and
• a balance between private dwelling and stewardship of place.
In this sense, Housestead is less a singular home than a testbed for how rural housing can evolve—rooted in local typologies, responsive to climate and ecology, and generative of new patterns of community and estate-based life.
