Career history

Interior Architect with an architectural education and over 30 years of international design experience.

The following is a brief resume of Paula Rapley-Smith’s professional journey and how these skills are applied to Styleopia’s Co-Constructive Design.

Inspired early on as an Architect in the Leisure Industry she moved with equal energy into the world of Historical Property, under the Royal Commission, completing the enhancement of the Queen’s Buckingham Palace privy purse lift in 1992 alongside projects for Windsor Estates and The Palace of Westminster.

Panoramic photographs of a leisure complex under construction, huge concrete columns and steel beams with workmen on site in the height of summer.

Further to architectural job offers in New York and London, she resided in Paris with Pierre-Yves Rochon for 6 years. Here she honed her Interior Architecture skills on both international residence and hotel design, with her final commercial project being the completion of the George V Hotel. She returned to London in 2000 to work for Hirsch Bedner Associates.

Since 2004 she has been contracted through Styleopia to work for Mary Fox Linton, Julian Bicknell Associates, Starwood Hotels & Resorts and others - today she focuses on private residential projects, working from her home office around her young family.