Services
Our in-house sustainability team’s expertise, research and collaborative approach equip us and our clients to create ambitious projects. The team is embedded in our design process from the first enquiry through to post-occupancy feedback, and its services influence every major decision along the way.
Environmental, social and governance
We work with clients from the start of each project to tailor an ambitious sustainability brief that adds recognisable value to their assets. We help clients navigate legislation and market trends; define a commercial case that aligns design aspirations with specific environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategies, green certifications, and accreditations; and translate these ESG goals into tangible designs.
Sustainability consultation
Our sustainability team ensures each of our projects addresses our six principles of sustainability. We analyse the project’s daylight, whole-life carbon and climatic context, and assess how wellbeing, social impact and the circular economy are woven into designs. From here, we develop a bespoke decarbonisation strategy to explore the design implications of net zero operational and embodied carbon.
Retrofit
We adapt existing buildings to sit within a new social and cultural context, reusing their components and integrating new with old. Having worked on various scales of retrofit across multiple sectors, we know there are no cookie-cutter solutions. We approach all projects with sensitivity, regardless of historic value, as we believe all buildings, structures and sites have an inherent value, whether to the local community or the broader public. Our sliding scale of intervention, which ranges from ‘refresh’ to ‘repurpose’ to ‘reimagine’, helps us categorise levels of intervention for a given project, brief and budget.
Design for circularity
We advocate for re-use and light-touch architecture wherever possible. Our sustainability team explores ways to refresh, repurpose and reimagine existing buildings, we run pre-demolition workshops to ensure any existing materials will be reused, and devise strategies to reduce the use of new materials, helping our design teams create resilient, future-proofed projects.
Materials
The Make Materials Hub, our curated physical and digital materials library and gallery space, is fundamental to our proactive approach to materials selection. Designed to grow with the practice, the hub allows us to track the latest materials technology developments and make informed decisions about circularity, embodied carbon and wellbeing. Managed by our in-house sustainability team, in collaboration with Materials Council, the library has an emphasis on innovative products, such as recycled materials and biomaterials.
