LAM Architects Ltd is a chartered practice, providing architectural and interior services specialising in residential, commercial and industrial architecture. Building Ireland touched base with Managing Director Tara Lamb to learn all about this award-winning firm – from its origins to the state of business today.
These are busy times at LAM Architects Ltd and the plan for Tara and Nick Lamb, along with the rest of the team in Holywood, Co Down, is to try and keep things that way for the foreseeable.
Established in 2018, the company switched its premises from Belfast to 2-4 Church Road
in Holywood last year and currently has six full-time staff on its books.
Tara Lamb heads up the business as its Managing Director, running it alongside her husband Nick, and together the team as a whole is hugely passionate about bespoke design, catering to wide range of clients with unique requirements and tastes.
Building Ireland caught up with Tara recently to hear more about LAM Architects Ltd, its recent double award success and overall ambitions as a company going forward.
“Whenever I first set up the practice, I guess we were mainly commercially based. I did one of the largest social housing schemes in Ireland, which is based Newry and is 350 houses, and then we also did some development projects,” she outlined.
“We do quite a few of those where we convert properties into apartments or find, you know, procure, we find properties and we help the developers to then develop them into apartments.
“They might be houses, you might do extensions on them, but then post-Covid we started doing more and more domestic projects as well as the commercial projects. We don’t specialise in anything in particular, but we do like quite a range of projects. We now have one-off houses and stuff like that as well.
“We’ve actually got one that’s about to be featured on a TV show here called ‘Restoration Rescue’ where we’re converting an old building into a very large family house. It’s quite a nice project.
“We’ve quite a lot of other projects on the books as well. We’ve done factories and we’re not necessarily pigeonholed in any one area.”
Tara’s own background saw her working in Brighton, UK, after having graduated from university there, and then eventually moving on to London to head up the architecture department at Spacelab.
From there, she had a stint in China working with a company called UDI on city scale master planning before returning back to Belfast a decade ago.
LAM Architects would be born in 2018 and it grew its excellent reputation quickly before the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
“It was probably one of the worst times to set up a practice,” Tara stated plainly. “When I started the business, we had all of these very big projects and a lot of them were offices or they were commercial projects, and when covid hit that really put a pause on all of those big projects.
“We were doing one for Seagate and then Seagate decided to re-analyse their production. So they have their production in Derry and they have production in the States, and they decided to refocus how they balanced that out so that project sort of went to one side.
“And, yeah, the same thing happened with other ones. So that’s when we had to re-look at the business model and what our other options were, and that’s where the domestic side of things came more into it because I think people were sitting in their houses looking at what they were living in and deciding that they wanted something different, or people were looking to build their own house in the country.
“It has definitely been testing, but I think that the key to business is just staying in business, you know? Keep your head down and keep going. We sort of pride ourselves on the product that we provide and you know the quality of the design work and the service that we provide to the client.
“I think that’s what has stood us in good stead. I’d say 90 percent of our business is repeat business and it’s people that we’ve worked with before that have chosen to just continue to work with us.”
Repeat business comes off the back of quality work and LAM Architects has already built an impressive portfolio in the short space of just seven years.
Right now, the company is immersed in numerous different projects, including an on-going one at Dublin’s Shelbourne Park Greyhound Stadium.
“We’ve got quite a few on the books at the minute. I mentioned the house at the minute that’s just started on site,” the Managing Director pointed out.
“We’re also doing a few apartments projects. We’re still working with the GRI as well, so we work with Greyhound Racing in Ireland. We were appointed under a tender for them. They’ve got 17 stadiums.
“Whenever we’re working with the GRI, it’s not just an architectural exercise. It’s also looking at the strategy of how to best spend money on their property. So it may not be that they need to do anything massive structurally. It just needs to be addressed in terms of, ‘okay, how do they increase the spend per person?’. ‘What would improve what the offering was?’.
“That was a big thing in the Shelbourne project because obviously we started that in 2020. So it was a really long process and actually, looking at it from like holistically, looking at it in terms of what would be the best.
“They came to us, basically, and they had a spend that they wanted to look at and instead of just taking directly what they said, we looked at it as if we were coming at it from nowhere and what’s the approach to the building? How do people interact with all the spaces in the building? And that sort of started how we then looked at bringing in all these different uses and trying to make it a seven-day-a-week operation.
“So a lot of the time, whenever we’re working with developer clients, that’s what we tend to do. We look at it from you know we know what they’re asking for, but maybe try and take a step back and say what is it that they actually need rather than what they think that they need.”
In May, LAM Architects saw its work on the redevelopment of Shelbourne Park Greyhound Stadium receiving recognition on a nation scale.
The company won ‘Architectural Design Excellence’ and ‘Fit-Out Project of the Year’ at the 2025 Irish Construction Excellence (ICE) Awards for the project which transformed an old betting hall into a fully reimagined, flexible venue featuring a sports bar, café, lounge, conference space and exhibition area, supporting year-round public use beyond race nights.
Speaking on the double award success that the company achieved that Thursday night at the Convention Centre Dublin, Tara said that the awards came as a total (and welcome) surprise to her and her team.
“Honestly, we were completely and utterly not expecting it. I was delighted just to be nominated, like we were just happy to be one of the finalists,” she said.
“I think I tried to say a little bit about this on the night, but we know how difficult it is to get a project from conception to completion and all of the different people that were nominated in those categories had the same difficulties I’m sure that we did.
“Each project that we’ve seen was that successful transition from idea to reality, so it was just a privilege to be part of that and to actually be awarded that was surprising. But we were delighted because it has been a very long arduous journey and we really tried to hold on to the key parts of the project.
“I’m hoping that’s what was recognised. That actually the concept that we came up with at the beginning is what was then realised at the end of the project, and it’s not just any one thing. The client really trusted us, the contractor really delivered what we had planned to be done and everything aligned.
“I wasn’t expecting it, but I’m absolutely delighted and, hopefully, it’ll translate into good things for our business but, ultimately, we are always striving to do the best that we can. It’s nice to get these awards, but the whole thing is just to keep striving to do better.”
Now, as she looking towards the coming months and ‘year eight’ for the business, Tara says that the hope is to get working on similar projects to that of Dublin’s Shelbourne Park Greyhound Stadium.
“I would love to get more opportunities, more projects and more chances to be involved in projects like Shelbourne and in other ones that we’ve got in our books,” she stated.
“We are just keen to get in contact with potential clients for anyone to reach out to us. My hope is that we get more and more projects, and that we can deliver something that both the client and the general public or the community think is good.”
LAM Architects
2-4 Church Road
Holywood,
BT18 9BU
Tel: 07703 599 993
Email: [email protected]
This article was published in Building Ireland Magazine, September, Vol 11 No 10
