Weir was founded in 2009 by a hydraulic engineer and a landscape architect who had spent four years arguing on the same job. The studio is eleven people in a converted grinding shop in Sheffield: four chartered engineers, three designers, two commissioning technicians, an operations manager, and a maintenance desk that answers the phone.
How we work
We take on about six projects a year and we run all of them through the same four stages: a feasibility week, a design period that ends with a physical test on the studio rig, construction with our own commissioning team on site, and a first-season review twelve months after handover. The review is not optional and it is in the fee. A fountain that has not been through a full year of weather has not been proved.
The rig
The back half of the building is a 9 m test bay with a 40 m³ tank, a variable-speed pump set and an anemometer array. Every effect we specify has been run there at full scale first, in wind, with the actual nozzle and the actual stone. It is the reason our commissioning periods are short and it is why we can tell a client what something will sound like before they have spent anything.
What we do not do
We do not design domestic garden ponds, we do not supply equipment without designing the installation it goes into, and we do not take on work where somebody else has already fixed the basin size. The basin is the design. If it is already poured, we are the wrong studio and we will say so in the first phone call.