manufacturing taste

Who, in the property world, should have had the training and the flair to advise clients on design trends? Who should have been the natural candidates to decode consumer behaviour and translate that into inspirational built form? Who ought to have been shaping public taste, introducing stylish finishes, and acting as cultural authorities on architectural design?

It’s letting agents. Obvs.

The Rise of the Agents

The traditional role of a letting agent was simple: find tenants, broker deals, and move on. But over the last forty years, agents have undergone a quiet metamorphosis into a powerful class of advisors whose influence extends far beyond the lease agreement. Developers now turn to them not just for tenant introductions but for guidance on what to design, how to fit it out, and which finishes to select.

Some agents are excellent — genuinely perceptive, stylish, and commercially astute. But many are not. Lacking design training, they default to imitation. They copy what has already been done, and so a cycle of derivative design perpetuates itself. The city fills with clones.

Look closely at speculative commercial developments and the pattern is clear: it usually takes a developer like Derwent London to unveil something bold and stylish. Agents then pounce on it, commodify the aesthetic, and spread diluted copies across the market for the next five to seven years.

The Vanishing Architects

And where are the architects in all this?

Not leading. Not shaping. Not curious.

The profession that once prided itself on vision has become mired in production. Architects today are buried under waterproofing packages, lintel schedules, and trackers. The design brief has been reduced from the spark of creativity into a tired template to regurgitate.

Worse still, architects seem strangely uninterested in the world around them. Few show curiosity about what other firms are building, who the key developers are, or where the market is heading. Sectors rise and collapse, typologies plateau or surge, yet architects remain aloof. Materials, finishes, FF&E trends, even innovations in structure and services — all these developments pass by with little more than a shrug.

Instead, architects talk to each other. They gather to lament their lack of appreciation by society, while wilfully ignoring the very cultural and economic currents that might have restored their relevance.

The Missed Opportunity

This is more than professional decline; it is a missed cultural opportunity.

Taste does not emerge organically. It is manufactured, seeded, and broadcast across society by industries that understand their role in shaping aspiration. Fashion, film, music, branding — these fields operate in tight choreography with media and consumers to define the zeitgeist. Architecture and interiors should be part of this same cultural production.

But architects, busy playing bureaucrats, have abandoned their post. Instead of manufacturing taste, they accept instructions from agents and clients. Instead of curating aspiration, they deliver compliance. The authors of space design have abdicated their role as tastemakers and reduced themselves to functionaries in a production line.

The Existential Question

Some architects, here and abroad, still manage to produce extraordinary work. They refuse exile in the bureaucratic gulag and remind us of what architecture can be. But they remain the minority.

The majority of architects, stripped of curiosity and imagination, now resemble little more than construction administrators. They are overshadowed by contractors and engineers who can often deliver the same utilitarian outcomes more efficiently, without the pretence of artistry.

So the question becomes unavoidable: if architects no longer shape taste, no longer manufacture desire, no longer cultivate curiosity — what is left of architecture?

A building trade. Nothing more.

Conclusion: The Great Abdication

This is the great abdication of architects. A profession that should have been leading has instead retreated. A cultural voice that could have set the agenda has fallen silent. Into the void have stepped letting agents — some brilliant, many not — to dictate taste, finishes, and design direction.

The irony is stark. Architects, who once claimed the mantle of visionaries, have been reduced to box-tickers. Letting agents, once mere intermediaries, now hold the power to define how cities look and feel.

Architecture was meant to be a calling. It has become a compliance industry. Unless architects rediscover curiosity, creativity, and courage, the design of our built world will remain in the hands of those who were never trained to imagine it in the first place.