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Journal

How to retrofit a London home to the EnerPHit standard

Rear extension to a Victorian London house, featuring textured mineral-render walls, a deep concrete roof overhang, and ultra-minimal frameless sliding glass doors. Warm timber-lined interiors glow in the spring morning sunlight, with a centrally positioned dining table, stone flooring, and a secluded garden framed by soft planting and mature trees. A glazed side door provides a visual connection through the original house, creating a calm and atmospheric indoor-outdoor living space.

London's housing is mostly old: Victorian terraces, Edwardian semis, solid brick and slate. They have a lot going for them, but most of them leak heat, cost a fortune to warm, and fall well short of the comfort we'd expect now. Older London homes are typically two to three times less …

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Building on brownfield land: policy, pitfalls and good design

A terrace of contemporary gable-fronted houses in pale grey brick, with perforated brickwork panels, full-height windows and recessed timber-clad entrance bays, set behind young trees and planting along a cobbled street in blossom. RISE Design Studio.

Behind the hoardings, at the backs of industrial estates and along the edges of railway lines, there's a lot of land that's been built on before and largely forgotten. With the pressure to build more homes, brownfield land has become the obvious place to look.

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Why MVHR matters in a low-energy home

Interior of a low-energy deep retrofit home by RISE Design Studio featuring natural timber finishes, large skylight, MVHR-integrated design, and garden connection through full-height glazing.

A house is only as healthy as the air inside it, and that's often where ordinary homes fall down. The better and tighter we build, the more deliberate we have to be about ventilation, and Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery (MVHR) is how we keep an airtight, well-insulated home …

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How to get planning permission for a new build or self-build home

A contemporary new-build house in pale grey brick with stacked, set-back volumes, planted green roofs, deep window reveals and a perforated brick screen, set behind a long reflecting pool and planting, with a period house and willow tree to one side. RISE Design Studio.

Putting a new building on a piece of land is a bigger undertaking than it looks, and most of the real work happens before the first brick is laid.

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Seeing past the plaster: retrofitting a mews house in Maida Vale

Dilapidated Maida Vale mews house with faded façade and garage door, symbolising the potential of low-energy retrofits to transform London’s historic homes into sustainable dwellings.

In Maida Vale, one of London's quieter and more characterful neighbourhoods, a crumbling one-bedroom mews house recently sold for around £2 million.

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What makes an extension genuinely sustainable

Interior of a rear extension with a reclaimed brick pier and wall, a polished concrete floor and plywood joinery, full-height glazing opening onto a planted garden with a terrace and chairs, and a corner window framing a young tree. RISE Design Studio.

An extension is usually about gaining a room or a better kitchen, but it is also one of the best chances you get to make a house healthier, cheaper to run and more comfortable, without moving.

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Why the UK needs to license its builders

Aerial view of a London terrace mid-renovation, its roof fully wrapped in white sheeting and scaffolding, with a skip and works below, set among neighbouring houses, gardens and rear extensions. RISE Design Studio.

We have seen up close what poor building work does to people: the hidden costs, the lost money, the trust that doesn't come back. And too often it traces to the same thing, that someone was allowed to trade as a builder who had no business doing so.

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Offsite manufacturing: building better, faster, lighter

Inside a light industrial factory, workers build and assemble timber-framed modular building units and closed panels for offsite construction, with stacks of dimensioned timber and a gantry crane, under a large steel-trussed roof with rooflights. RISE Design Studio.

The way we build most homes hasn't changed much in decades: assembled piece by piece, outdoors, in the weather, by trades working in sequence. It works, but it is slow, wasteful and hard to control for quality.

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Retrofit or rebuild? How developers should decide

A retained red-brick building with tall arched steel-framed windows and a gabled roof, extended with a contemporary slate-clad addition behind, above a stone-paved terrace and steps rising through a densely planted garden of grasses and perennials. RISE Design Studio.

One of the questions we are asked most often, by developers especially, is whether to retrofit an existing building or knock it down and start again.

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A new pavilion for Sutton Churches Tennis Club

A long, single-storey weathered timber-clad tennis pavilion with a rusting corrugated-metal roof, small windows and overgrown planting climbing one end, set behind a tarmac forecourt under a blue sky. RISE Design Studio.

We have been appointed to design a new pavilion for Sutton Churches Tennis Club, and it is exactly the kind of project we most like to take on: modest in scale, serious in intent, and rooted in a community.

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