Who We Are
Vavaki is driven by the desire to enrich and improve daily life. We pride ourselves in delivering innovative transformational solutions that add value socially and commercially. We believe good design delivers sustainable solutions and sustainable investment returns.
Our work is informed and influenced by the ‘genius loci’ the presiding deity or spirit and unique qualities of a place, it should be the respect of what Alexander Pope in his address to Lord Burlington agues as “instanced in architecture and gardening,... all must be adapted to the genius of the place... the beauties not forced into it but resulting from it”. Respecting this theory has led us to achieving a rich and diverse body of work that makes a difference around the world.
Award-Winning Excellence
Vavaki is proud to be recognised for outstanding achievement in design and development, earning the 2017 Best Mixed Use Development at the Africa Property Awards and the 2018 Best Architecture Practice at the UK-Africa Building Awards. These accolades reflect our commitment to innovative, impactful solutions in the built environment.
Ethical Culture
Vavaki is a staff owned practice, internally funded with no external debt and no external shareholders. This means our staff own the firm and guide its future.
Vavaki has a strong culture, a culture driven by a strong set of values including total design, integrity and social usefulness, exceptional commercial value for our clients and partners. We have the freedom to share our profit and reinvest in our firm (in terms of our people, training, R&D and charitable donations).
Much of our R&D work explores innovative solutions to perplexing problems facing the future of urban growth migration and development in our African communities.Vavaki’s global team is multicultural and stimulated by the broadest possible cultural discourse, and is characterised by a sense of curiosity and a research-based innovative design methodology.
Collaborative Culture
Our people work together, learn, and share knowledge and skills, whilst openly collaborating with our clients and professional team members. We highly prize unity and enthusiasm in teams, because we have learned that open collaboration is fundamental to achieving our goal of total architecture. Our values are caring and come with generous individual freedom combined with responsibility. We are proud of the fact that none of our projects are clones of each other and believe that every client and project is unique and requires a unique solution and approach. This is how we instinctively encourage a stimulating working environment. Our people are passionate about development, delivering the best solutions.
Sustainable Development Culture
Vavaki believes “Sustainability is not just material use or energy conservation...it is a lifestyle”. On every development project, we endeavour to deliver Green and Sustainable Developments which is a critical embodiment to all Vavaki projects, and as such we work together with our clients to develop strategies and series of deliberately ambitious sustainability objectives in order to design within the natural capacity of the planet.
Sustainability is about the whole philosophy of how you use resources and live. It is therefore not an add-on or even something that we consciously separate out from the design concept. Vavaki continually experiments with sustainable materials and seeks to achieve the optimum environment through orientation, shading and sensitivity to the local climate. These objectives would be there to assist our clients to understand how their development masterplan, architecture and engineering design and buildings might be:
• Moving towards Carbon neutral
• Self-sufficient by collecting and re-using water
• Built using sustainable materials
• Able to cope with future climate change
• A positive contribution to the community and built environment
• Sustainable in operation
We see no disconnect between exceptionally ethical behaviour, and exceptional organisational outcomes.
Contact us
Have a project in mind or want to collaborate? Share a few details with us, and our team will be in touch shortly.