Mother House Studios
Mother House Studio is a pioneering artist studio model with integrated (child)care, where children are welcome in the workspace
The Mother House Studios provide a creative solution to the lack of sufficient support for professional artists during pregnancy and motherhood. The model adapts existing venues to combine inspiring, flexible and affordable workspace for artists with integrated childcare, creating the conditions for artistic practice and caring responsibilities to coexist rather than compete.
The model is based on integration. At its heart is an open-plan laboratory where artists can work freely, interconnected with a dedicated space for children who have the freedom to move between the two rooms. Responsibility for care is shared between childcare facilitators and parents, all jointly involved in hands-on care work. A communal kitchen anchors the space, offering time for aggregation and the kind of informal exchange that helps artists find collective strategies for sustaining a workable integration of life and practice.
The Model
Mother House Studios emerged from a simple but radical premise: that artists with caring responsibilities deserve professional studio space that works around their lives, rather than asking them to work around its limitations. Rather than building new infrastructure from scratch, the model adapts existing venues, embedding childcare directly into the studio environment so that artists can work alongside their children in a shared, creative and community-led space.
A timeline
Mother House Studios, IKLECTIK, 2016
2016, London, IKLECTIK Art Lab The first pilot welcomed over thirty-five artists and their children into an open plan studio and garden, testing the integration of creative practice and shared care for the first time.
Mother House Studios, 2017
2017, London and Stroud Further pilots explored financial sustainability and developed intentional childcare practices, deepening the ethos of the model across two different communities and contexts.
Mother House Studios Catford
2018, London The model received its first public funding through the Mayor of London, Lewisham Council and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, alongside a successful Spacehive crowdfunding campaign backed by over two hundred supporters.
Mother House studio Catford
2021, Catford Mews, Lewisham. The first longer term home, built from upcycled materials, brought a large studio and playroom together in a community hub, embedding the model more deeply in Lewisham.
Mother House Studios - House in the Hill
2023, House on the Hill, Lewisham Following eviction from Catford, the studios relocated and entered a period of transition, strengthening their resilience while Dyana Gravina developed the Integrated Care Toolkit.
Mother House Studios: Lewisham
Option 3 In July 2025 the studios became an independent Community Interest Company, self-organised and led by the artists who had built their practices within it, with founder Dyana Gravina continuing as an advisor.
From a single open-plan studio and garden in Waterloo to a collectively self-organised Community Interest Company in Lewisham, Mother House Studios has become one of the most sustained models for integrating care into artistic practice in the UK. Described by the Mayor of London as one of the most innovative civic initiatives in the city, it has inspired similar models nationally and internationally, and continues to demonstrate that care transforms not only how artists work but how communities form and sustain themselves. Over nearly a decade of grassroots organising, self-funded efforts and collective learning, it has changed the lives of the artists and children who have passed through its doors, and remains one of Procreate Project’s most tangible expressions of what it means to build cultural infrastructure that genuinely includes and sustains people with caring responsibilities.
If you wish to know more about the studio model, visit the Integrated Care Toolkit website or reach out via email
