The late Jeremy Paxton, Chairman of Lower Mill Estate.
“I cannot stop thinking about Dorset - it is consuming me and I am terribly excited about working with you as I am thoroughly inspired by your thinking. I get more out of myself playing alongside you”. 

Moira Fraser with reference to Dorset.
“RR has done a terrific job”. 

Jeremy Melvin, on the Sundance Villa, Lower Mill Estate in Country Houses Today (Wiley)
“The responsibility for making such a house falls largely to the masterplanning architect, Richard Reid. He has matured his own approach to domestic design over several decades largely in affluent suburbs where he has found scope for innovative domestic design, weaving his predilections for the Californian Case Study Houses with inventive interpretations of the suburban vernacular”.

Hugh Pearman on Lower Mill Estate in The Sunday Times
“This is a fascinating experiment, an attempt to make a leisure utopia out of water and architecture ….. at first, Paxton built modern-vernacular houses. Then, guided by Richard Reid, his masterplanning architect, he started thinking bigger. Reid designed the estate’s first landmark house, a big modernist ocean liner of a house called Somerford Villa”.

The Sun House, Lower Mill Estate was joint winner of The Sunday times Small House Award.
“a little gem….a model for an exclusive country house on a private nature reserve….designed to sit right on the water’s edge”.

Charles Jencks on Epping Civic Offices: Architectural Design
“A superb example of…contextualism which pulls together a messy high street with a set of strong forms and contrasting colours…the low three storey block, contextual to the existing street is anchored by a strong octagonal tower that also marks a huge arch and the main entry”.

Colin Amery : The Financial Times.
“Richard Reid has always been eager to find a way of utilising his understanding of townscape to design new buildings that fit into their settings. The Civic Offices he has built for Epping District Council are a strong and bold statement that puts Epping on the architectural map and an extraordinary exercise in townscape enhancement”.

Peter Davey, The Architectural Review
Finland Quays was seen as part of the beginnings of what could be “a coherent body of high density urban housing….seven pavilions sit facing the water of Greenland Dock … it is rather as if a series of very large Classical villas by Decimus Burton had been joined together and elevated with stuccoed bay windows and bands of brick by an Arts and Crafts architect”.

The Architects Journal
Awarded a prize at The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the jury comments on the project as: “Significant in that it suggests how an urban order could be established in London’s docklands…Through a careful analysis and amalgam of Thames- side and continental places and spaces… Reid has created a series of places related to water”.

Colin Amery: The Financial Times
The practice is best known, for its “unusual mixture of an understanding of the English traditional vernacular and an awareness of International architectural styles and fashion as well as an ability of utilizing an understanding of townscape to design new buildings that fit into their settings”.

Richard Meier: Japan Architect
Awarded third equal prize in the Japan Architect Competition, The House for an Intersection, the project was described by Richard Meier, the assessor as: “impressive for its analysis of historic buildings that have been created as part of the total additive fabric of the city”.

The Architects Journal
The practice’s competition proposals for Grand Buildings in Trafalgar Square were described as “one of the most accomplished complex contextual schemes derived from a close analysis of the site, of surrounding buildings and of key vistas.

Inspector at the Public Inquiry of Proposed housing at Stratton Place Cirencester
Described by the Inspector, as having “gone to considerable lengths to devise an acceptable scheme. In essence the design concept is intended to reinstate the grandeur of Stratton Place framing it with new extensions that would be subservient in scale and a ‘meandering’ informal group of ‘cottages’ with a central shared space. There is much to commend in this rather imaginative approach”.

Elizabeth Williamson on Finland Quays The Buildings of England: London Docklands
“Enjoyable elemental shapes and volumes distilled from historic styles and well composed”.

Michael Graves, on the Villa Vasone. Progressive Architecture Awards
“Serene and handsome and, at the same time, picturesque…I would be quite delighted to have this architect design a city hall or a childrens’ home or almost any other kind of project involving the public at large because of the incredible sensitivity to the size and proportions of us as we occupy the rooms as well as us as we identify collectively”.

Stephen Bayley on Lower Mill Estate, The Daily Telegraph
“These houses have been sensitively integrated into the landscape. They are uncompromisingly modern but respectful too”.

Professor Brian Edwards: Understanding architecture through drawing (Chapman and Hall)
“His studies of outhouses in Kent were an inspiration for his design for a National Trust visitor centre at Chartwell. The freehand drawings provided a source of references which Reid selectively exploited for his new design. The skill Reid demonstrates in his sketching has enriched his experience as a modern designer. In fact, in the work of Reid and Mackintosh it is difficult to draw a rigid line between the creative artist and the creative designer”.

Dan Cruikshank on Chartwell, The Architects Journal
“Reid draws on vernacular for National Trust Shop…rose to the challenge…Reid has a reputation for the sensitive use and interpretation of regional building traditions when designing new buildings for sensitive sites”.

Colin Amery : The Financial Times
“Reid has given the Trust a simple and elegant, modern building…It is a cross between a barn and an oast – the tall tiled roof culminates in a curved oast funnel that casts a shower of top light into the centre of the shop…a considerable architectural presence”.

Ken Allison: London’s Contemporary Architecture (Fourth Edition)
“Richard Reid, responsible for some notable housing designs and Epping Town Hall…..designed Finland Quays as a ‘necklace’ of 7 pavilions at a time when architects felt they were rediscovering a warm and comfortable vernacular tradition”.

Professor Brian Edwards: Understanding architecture through drawing (Chapman and Hall)
“Richard Reid’s drawings of Epping High Street provide the context for the design of his town hall. The dictates of the function are moderated by a concern for the historic fabric of the town. These sketches show how place and programme are reconciled”.

Trevor Garnham: Pomp and Circumstance; a critique of Epping Forest Civic Offices: The Architects Journal
“Epping held a two stage competition…Reid was a clear winner with a scheme that had both striking impact and revealed a deep understanding of such English towns. Moreover, his work has a serious engagement with the vernacular from which such places are made. He was a regular contributor to the Architectural Review in the 60’s analysing, with Ian Nairn, the character of places through sketches of the kind made famous by Gordon Cullen’s Townscape. There followed a long spell teaching at Kingston and the South Bank Polytechnic during which time his topographical drawing became legend, before he set up in practice…… Like Louis Kahn, he is fascinated by the logic and craft of construction. But he remains acutely aware of the Englishness of English art allowing, as early Lutyens, the ‘high game’ of architecture to provide order not image in his works”.

Haig Beck, Editor: Architectural Design
“In his essay, Rooms, Richard Reid places the conceptualization of domestic space within a cultural and historical context. He discusses the similarities in spatial organization between the modern movement, functionalist aesthetic and vernacular domestic building. However he points out that the functionalist aesthetic failed to allow for the cultural clutter of everyday life. He goes on to show how, through history, the simple spatial arrangement of the house became compartmentalized and that it was not until Wright and Mies that domestic space was once again freed, and that it is the hearth centred pin-wheeling spaces of Wright that suggest a future direction”.

Paul Barker: Master of Suburbia, Evening Standard
“A new generation of architects is beginning to learn from the once despised semis of suburbia and from the man who was their progenitor. A new exhibition at the RIBA Heinz Gallery pays overdue homage to the design work of C.A.F. Voysey, the architect who most vigorously pursued the idea of an English “national style”… You see the signs of this stuff everywhere, in the stubby brick tower of the newly opened and much praised Epping Town Hall, carefully slotted into what is still a kind of market town on the edge of London. They were designed by Richard Reid who had one of his first major architectural flings in docklands with houses at Finland Quays”.

Richard Weston: In search of the Convivial City, The Architects Journal (with reference to Finland Quays)
“Reid’s design is outstanding. The site strategy is derived from Le Corbusier’s Immeubles-Villas projects of the 1920’s with the long side facing the water broken into linked pavilions to allow glimpses of the dock from the terrace behind. The pavilions recall the second stage Cherry Garden Pier proposal, inspired by linked Palazzi blocks of Bologna. Here, however, the scale is smaller and the precedent local – Searle’s ‘Paragon’ in Blackheath…“Reid sees this area as part of south London and has turned to the suburban vernacular of classic villas developed in the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth century for inspiration….the design is composed with the visual skill that Reid’s numerous competition entries would lead one to expect and any doubts about his ability to translate the artfully wobbly lines of his exquisite pen drawings into convincing fabric are dispelled by both distant and – allowing for the financial constraints – detailed scrutiny of the buildings”.

Trevor Garnham: Pomp and Circumstance; a critique of Epping Forest Civic Offices: The Architects Journal
“The final impression from my visit is sitting in the visitor’s balcony looking across the council chamber and out through the window…I turned to leave….and could see Bodley’s tower at the centre of Epping;  the public’s place in the building, the place of politics and the place of building in the town were all brought together in this moment. If politics is the activity of shaping the future then it calls on the past in reaching decision, the gathered wisdom embodied perhaps in the idea of the town….In emphasizing the structure of the place and using it as the point of departure for his project, Reid has given Epping a building that both sympathetically develops the two (or even helps to establish it) and reaffirms the place of politics”.

Mr and Mrs Cullen, Private House, Sevenoaks
“Richard has a wonderful ability to engage with a client and to understand and interpret a client’s lifestyle and vision. He then uses this understanding as the context for his fluent and creative design…..We would love to build another house just to have the joy of working with him again”.

Dean Harris, Former Head of Urban Design at Thurrock Thames Gateway Development Corporation
“Richard and his colleagues were brought in to help progress development on a regeneration site in Thurrock when developers and the local planning authority were struggling to find a way forward. I was impressed with the way Richard Reid Architects collaborated with all parties to find positive solutions resulting in planning permission and a good quality scheme that has helped to stimulate regeneration of the area”.