London's architectural visualisation studio for planning, marketing and design sign-off.

We'd been let down before by renders that looked great until a planning officer started asking questions. AVL were different. They built the verified views off the survey points from our own site and delivered the lot at AVR Level 3 with the methodology written up properly. Tower Hamlets didn't query a single viewpoint, which genuinely hasn't happened to us before.

The masterplan was always going to live or die on how it sat in those protected London views, so the townscape evidence had to be watertight. AVL’s TVIA visuals made the change obvious enough that the committee could see exactly what they were approving without anyone talking them through it. We got the permission.

Our clients sign off a room before we build a thing, so if the CGI oversells it, we're the ones taking the call afterwards. AVL didn't oversell. They went back and forth with us twice on the joinery, the stone and the daylight until it was right, and when the Chelsea room was finished it matched what we'd shown the client. Big relief.

It's a tight little Shoreditch street and honestly I doubted a photomontage could ever look believable there. They photographed the site themselves and slotted the new frontage in so naturally that the pedestrians, the lamp posts, the shop signs all still sit in front of it exactly where they should. Hackney asked for five viewpoints and every one held up. I couldn't tell you which parts were real.

I was nervous the new mansard would look bolted on next to the original terrace. I needn't have been. They matched the brick and the render to the existing building right down to the mortar lines, and at the design review nobody could work out where the old building ended and the new part began. Exactly what we'd hoped for.

What I appreciated was that they understood Camden before they ever picked up a camera. They knew how the case officers read a view, which sightlines the London View Management Framework protects, and where we were exposed. I've used studios that just make it look pretty. This lot saved us a whole round of revisions by getting it right first time.

We had four schemes all hitting the same submission window across Camden, Islington and Southwark, and I still don't know how AVL kept it all on track, but they did. Every set was in before its committee date. In planning that's everything; miss the date and you wait months.

One point of contact the whole way through, a snagging list that actually got shorter every week, and meetings that finished on time. They just got on with the image side so my architects could keep their heads in the drawings. Easiest part of the whole project, honestly.

I half expected to be sold a big fixed package of images we didn't need. Instead they worked out which shopfront views the Westminster application actually required and told us what we could cut. We paid for what we used and nothing more. Refreshing, frankly.