The practice, the space, and the person behind it.
More than three decades of study across movement, physical training, breathwork, somatic practice and reflective frameworks, held as one method.
The work draws on Classical Pilates, yoga, strength and conditioning, biomechanics, dance, breathwork and contemplative practice. That breadth is what allows the practice to respond: to move between disciplines where they are useful, and to stay with a single method for as long as that method is the work.
What holds it together is not a system but attention — to one person, over time.
The work begins with how your body moves — how your foot meets the floor, where a shoulder gives way under effort, which patterns are structural and which are simply habit. What we find there decides which methods are drawn on and which skills the work sets out to challenge. Not everything is corrective: some of the work is about carrying the detail into dynamic practice, where there is room to explore movement, flow, and the joy of being in your body. Whatever the direction, the practice is physical, and it remains the foundation of the work.
A body is not only an instrument: it is where thought, feeling and history are held. Breath mechanics, somatic work and reflective enquiry sit alongside your movement training. Throughout the work there are times when what is needed is not more exertion but more calibration. Widening the lens to the body’s other systems brings the whole into better balance, and can help shift a pattern that physical training alone cannot. What emerges is a system that can regulate itself, and recover on its own terms.
The body has its own language, and learning it is part of the work. Within a session, attention goes not only to doing an exercise well, but to understanding it, and how it relates to your own structure. Learning this invites sensations, compensations, and the places where movement isn’t yet available to become less about what is wrong and more about the why, and where you can direct your focus. What can be named is easier to feel, and what is understood can be done with precision. What you gain is a body you can read, and an understanding that holds beyond the session.
The work takes its measure from what you bring to it: your goals, your aspirations, and the life it must fit within. Where something can be achieved in a short, focused period, the schedule reflects that; where it calls for a longer, more progressive approach, the commitment it involves is expressed openly. Throughout, the work returns to a single question: is this still what best serves you, and at what rhythm? The answer may be several visits a week, or an occasional session that keeps the work alive within the rest of your training.
And in the end, what all of it serves is simple: to enjoy living in the body we have, for as long as we have it.
The vocabulary that informs the work.
Yoga is approached as a three-dimensional practice integrating movement, breath, and attention. Postural sequences provide structure through which internal regulation can be observed and refined. Breath is not secondary to movement but woven throughout, shaping pacing, sensation, and continuity within the body. The emphasis remains on awareness and steadiness rather than form alone.
Within this work, Pilates functions as a language for organising movement around the centre of the body. It provides a framework through which stability, coordination, and power can be accessed and distributed through the whole system. Rather than focusing on exercises in isolation, the material is used to develop resilience and stamina in the ranges and patterns we rely on every day — from rolling and rising to carrying load and sustaining effort. In this way, classical foundations become a practical means of strengthening how the body supports itself in ordinary life.
Strength goes beyond healthy bones. Conditioning is about preparing the body to keep the range it already has and to build upon it. That means supporting joints and tissue, extending the range they can be trusted through, and widening what the body can take on. In the studio this is developed through low-load resistance, isometrics, balance work, weight-bearing and loaded movement, and the faster elastic patterns of plyometrics. The aim is strength that is available rather than aesthetic — enough for everyday movement, and for a more dynamic life as and when we choose it.
Biomechanics offers a way of understanding how the body organises itself in movement. It brings attention to subtle, often unnoticed patterns — how weight is distributed, how joints prefer to move, and how effort is layered through the system. Through this awareness, movement can be refined at a neural level, restoring efficiency and clarity where compensation has accumulated over time. The process is less about correction and more about recognising and reorganising how the body speaks.
The Enneagram is a dynamic map of personality patterns, core motivations, and instinctual responses, and of how these tendencies show up through the body as well as the mind. It is used here as a lens for recognising habitual internal structures rather than as a prescriptive personality label: how a particular way of training either aligns with one’s natural style or creates unnecessary tension, overwhelm, or avoidance — helping shift from patterned reactivity toward more conscious presence.
Internal Family Systems recognises that we are not singular in our experience — the part that wants the glass of wine and the part that wants to wake early; the part that braces and pushes through, and another that feels tired or unseen. Here these parts are met through the body as much as through thought: tight shoulders, a held chest, persistent tension or fatigue can reflect parts working hard to protect or contain something. Meeting them with attention rather than correction allows patterns to soften and reorganise — gradually rather than dramatically, until what is often described as “embodiment” becomes practical: a quieter, more integrated way of inhabiting oneself.
Arranged over two floors within a secluded mews, Atelier108 offers two distinct environments for focused one-to-one practice.
Atelier108 is set within a peaceful, gated mews in Pimlico, SW1, two minutes from Pimlico station. Victoria, Westminster and St James’s Park are all within a short walk. Entry is from the street by intercom.
Guests are invited to arrive early and to linger after their session, and to enjoy the garden surroundings. Complimentary off-street parking is available on request.
Light and generously proportioned, the first-floor Movement Lab is designed for physical practice. Handmade Italian Pilates apparatus, built to classical specification — Reformer, Tower, Chair and Barrels — sits alongside an Iyengar rope wall and chairs, a ballet barre, weights and movement props, allowing the work to move fluidly between Pilates, biomechanics, strength, yoga and free movement.
Quieter and more enclosed, the ground-floor Anahā Studio supports pranayama, restorative yoga, meditation and reflective work. Blankets, bolsters, blocks and a treatment table create a setting for stillness, recovery and slower forms of practice.
Both spaces remain available throughout every session. Equipment is cleaned after every session. Barefoot training is preferred. Grip socks are also welcome.
The studio includes changing and shower facilities, along with hair-drying and styling tools. Towels and toiletries are provided. Complimentary tea, coffee and water are available throughout the visit.
Sessions are carefully spaced to allow time and privacy between clients. Both the start and the finish of every session are protected by uninterrupted time for arrival and departure, so that you can settle into the space before you begin and leave without feeling hurried.
Rachel is the founder and facilitator of Atelier108. Her working life has spanned more than three decades of movement practice, beginning with formal dance and choreography training at fourteen. She has been teaching for over twenty years.
Her career has moved between private practice, mentoring and teacher training, programme leadership and retreat work — from one-to-one teaching to large group classes and festivals. A group can be taught, but it cannot be known. What she does now is the narrower end of that range: individual, interdisciplinary practice, one person at a time.
Her work has included dancers and people new to movement, those rebuilding after injury and those refining established physical practices — including clients for whom privacy is a professional necessity.
Her early years as a dancer led to training and working in New York, where encounters with Pilates and yoga began to broaden her understanding of movement beyond performance. Extended periods of study in India and Thailand deepened that shift, bringing breath, attention and contemplative practice into the picture.
Rather than replacing one discipline with another, each became part of a broader understanding of the work. Years of teaching, alongside continued study of biomechanics, somatic and psychological frameworks, have shaped the interdisciplinary practice she works with today. Her eventual move towards one-to-one work was part of the same evolution: a desire for greater specificity, continuity and attention to the individual.
Rachel’s teaching is steady, intelligent and relational — it strengthens without hardening and deepens without burdening.
She works with the body as both structure and story, interested in the ways physical practice and inner enquiry inform one another. The work responds to what is present, while remaining attentive to what is seeking development. That steadiness is a quality of attention rather than of effort; the physical practice it accompanies is itself precise, progressive and often demanding.
Having taught groups of every size, Rachel works one-to-one by choice, for what it allows her to see. Teaching a room has to aim somewhere near the middle; teaching one person can follow what is actually there. It is this, more than any single method, that shapes how and what she teaches.
Further study in biomechanics, functional movement, gait and foot analysis, and strength and resistance training.
Over a decade of study and applied practice in the Enneagram, both taught and independent.