There is a particular kind of architect who arrives at their profession through a perfectly logical sequence of events: an early passion for drawing, a parent in construction, a straight line from school to university to practice. Peter Murundu is not that architect. Murundu’s path into architecture winds through onion fields, a brief aviation fantasy, a calculus shock, and a five-minute job interview that changed everything. It is a journey shaped less by certainty than by curiosity — and it has produced one of Nairobi’s most thoughtful emerging architectural voices.
Ask Peter Murundu about his school days, and he laughs — the easy, self-aware laugh of someone who has long since made peace with the absurdity of his own story.
At secondary school, technical drawing classes were a mystery and an irritation. While classmates puzzled over T-squares and set squares, young Murundu looked on with something between boredom and bewilderment. His Form Four project of choice? Agriculture. Specifically: onions.
Architecture, in those days, was not even on the horizon. The instruments of design were a foreign language he had no particular interest in learning.
“I was wondering what these guys were doing with T-squares, Z-squares,” he recalls. “And it never hit me.”
The architect he would become was, at that moment, entirely invisible — even to himself. Which makes what followed all the more remarkable.
The Father’s Advice and the Accidental Vocation
After secondary school, Murundu had vague ambitions that clustered around motion and mechanics. He imagined himself as a pilot, perhaps, or a mechanical or structural engineer. Something that felt expansive and financially promising.
It was his father who intervened — and with the kind of quiet authority that tends to lodge in a young person’s mind long after the conversation has ended.
Architecture, his father suggested, offered exactly that independence. And though Murundu’s post-secondary grades were not strong enough to secure direct admission into a public university architecture programme, the seed had taken root.
He enrolled at the Nairobi Institute of Technology — still relatively new at the time — and braced himself for what he imagined would be a world of drawing, form and creative intuition. The first lesson delivered something rather different.
“The first lesson was calculus,” he says. “I was wondering why we are doing all this mathematics and I want to design houses.”
But instead of defeating him, the encounter with calculus did something unexpected: it lit a spark. The realisation that architecture was a discipline of profound complexity — of engineering and art held together in creative tension — deepened his engagement rather than diminishing it.
“It started sinking in how architecture is completely different,” he recalls. “And now my interest became more.”
The Diploma That Opened the Door
Murundu had initially planned to complete his diploma and enter practice quickly. It is a path that many take in Kenya’s construction sector, particularly when the goal is early financial independence.
But the more he researched the profession, the more he understood what registered architectural practice actually required — and the more certain he became that he wanted it fully.
“So I worked hard on my diploma,” he says, without a trace of false modesty. “I think I was one of the best students in that campus at that point in time.”
That performance earned him direct entry into second year at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology — a significant acceleration that compressed years of study and set him on a faster trajectory toward full qualification.
Graduating in 2011, Murundu found himself at the edge of a profession he had stumbled into accidentally and pursued with everything he had. What came next would forge the architect he is today.
The Education No University Teaches
Murundu’s post-graduation career began at Mutiso Menezes International (MMI), one of Kenya’s most established and respected architectural firms. The exposure was formative, the compensation surprisingly generous for a young graduate.
“I was being paid really well,” he acknowledges. For a newly minted architect, that matters. But something in the work left him restless.
“When you’re doing that kind of job, there’s not much room for thinking,” he explains. “The concept has already been done.” Large firms, by necessity, operate through systems and hierarchies. For a young architect hungry to think from first principles, that can feel constraining.
The referral that changed his trajectory came from a colleague: a startup architectural firm called Design Partnership Limited (DPL), run by an architect named Rajan. The interview was memorably brief.
“He asked me how good I was,” Murundu recalls. “I told him I’m good with Archicad and basic design knowledge.” The job was his. And with it came an education that no university offers.
As DPL’s first employee, Murundu watched its founder navigate every dimension of running a practice: business development, client relations, project management, team building, and the countless small decisions that determine whether a young firm grows or stagnates. The salary was lower than MMI. The education was priceless.
He was also part of the team behind The Purple Tower — a project that still stands as one of Nairobi’s more striking additions to the skyline. For a young architect still defining his design language, that kind of visible, landmark-scale work is a formative experience.
The Leap Into the Unknown
Leaving stable, salaried employment to start a firm is always a gamble. Most people who take that leap do so with some safety net: savings accumulated, a client already committed, a partner’s income to fall back on.
Murundu had none of that.
In 2018, he and Joshua Apale co-founded Harmony Design Studio Limited. No savings. No guaranteed projects. No safety net. Just the conviction born from watching someone else build something from nothing — and the belief that what he had learned could be translated into something of his own.
The early years were exactly as demanding as that kind of beginning suggests. The firm operated from co-working spaces and home offices. Projects came through referrals and personal networks. Growth was deliberate, careful, and sometimes painfully slow.
“Honestly, up until now, I’m still scared,” he admits, with the disarming candour that characterises his conversation. But the fear, he insists, has never been immobilising.
“Every day when I wake up, there’s something to do. If you throw yourself out there in the battlefield, you will always win something.”
An Architect With Something to Say
Today, Murundu is not simply building a practice. He is developing a point of view about architecture’s role in society — and he is not shy about expressing it.
On Kenya’s tendency to sideline local consultants on major development projects, his frustration is measured but clear: “The cake is too big. We can all share.”
On affordable housing — a topic dominating Kenyan policy conversations — he goes further, arguing that the sector’s failures are not primarily financial. They are spatial and social.
His vision of successful affordable housing describes communities, not just units: places with parks, retail, schools, transit and dignity — the full ecosystem of human flourishing, not simply shelter stacked vertically.
Still Building – The Long Game
Harmony Design Studio, as of 2024, is no longer the tentative startup of 2018. It has its own office space, a growing team, and a portfolio that speaks for the quality of its work across multiple typologies.
“We are happy where we are,” Murundu says — and means it. Not as complacency, but as the particular contentment that comes from knowing you are building something real, at a pace that will make it last.
His deepest ambition, when you press him, is not a trophy building or a major award. It is the same impulse that drove him to take a chance on Design Partnership all those years ago: the desire to be part of someone else’s beginning.
He wants to train graduate architects the way he was trained — through proximity to real practice, real challenges, real clients and real consequences. He wants to be, for someone else, what Rajan was for him.
It is, in the end, a fitting ambition for a man who arrived at architecture through detour, curiosity and a memorable onion project. The profession did not find Peter Murundu through the conventional door. But he has made himself thoroughly at home — and he is only just getting started.
