Sustainable Architects in London | RISE Design Studio

London is a city that has always rebuilt itself. Georgian terraces became Victorian extensions. Warehouses became apartments. Post-war estates became the subject of regeneration schemes that are still running today. The city has never stopped changing, and it won't stop now.

What's different this time is the stakes. The question facing every architect, developer, and homeowner in London isn't just what to build or how to extend. It's how to do it in a way that doesn't burden the next generation with the consequences of decisions made today.

That question sits at the centre of everything we do at RISE Design Studio.

Sustainable retrofit of a London terrace house by RISE Design Studio

What Sustainable Architecture Actually Means

The word sustainable gets used loosely. In our work, it has a specific meaning.

A genuinely sustainable building performs well on operational energy, the energy used to heat, cool, and power it year after year. It accounts for embodied carbon, the footprint locked into its materials and construction. It provides a healthy internal environment: good air quality, natural light, thermal stability. And it's built to last, to adapt, and to retain value over time rather than becoming a liability.

That's a more demanding brief than most buildings are designed to. It's also a more interesting one.

Choosing a sustainable architect means committing to a design process that treats these questions as fundamentals, not extras. The decisions that determine a building's lifetime performance are made early, often in the first few weeks of a project. Getting them right from the outset is considerably easier, and cheaper, than trying to correct them later.

Our Expertise

RISE Design Studio is led by two co-directors with complementary experience across the full spectrum of architectural scale and complexity.

Sean Ronnie Hill is a RIBA and ARB-registered architect and certified Passivhaus Designer with two decades of experience in low-energy residential and community projects across London. His work has consistently focused on fabric-first sustainable design, from whole-house EnerPHit retrofits to new builds designed to Passivhaus certification.

Imran Jahn brings a different but equally important dimension to the practice. With a background leading multi-million pound commercial and mixed-use projects, including One Bishopsgate in the City of London, Imran has the technical depth and project leadership experience to navigate complex, high-value commissions with confidence. At RISE, that experience is applied to sustainable projects at every scale, from residential extensions to community buildings, with the same rigour and ambition that large-scale developments demand.

Together they lead a studio where Passivhaus expertise, adaptive reuse as a design principle, and a genuine commitment to long-term performance sit alongside serious design quality. The two things are not in tension at RISE. They're the same thing.

Projects Worth Knowing About

Herbert Paradise, Kensal Rise A whole-house EnerPHit retrofit that reduced the home's energy demand by 75%. Super-insulation, airtight construction, MVHR, and a substantial solar array that now generates more electricity than the household uses. The materiality, timber, stone, exposed concrete, is deliberate and characterful. The sustainability isn't visible. It's structural.

The Lexi Cinema, Kensal Rise The first cinema in the UK with an auditorium controlled by an MVHR system paired with an air-to-air source heat pump. Super-insulated external skin, sedum wildflower roof, and a commitment to adaptive reuse of a building that matters to its community. Cultural heritage and low-energy performance, in the same building.

Sutton Churches Tennis Club Pavilion A new community pavilion built in cross-laminated timber with natural ventilation as the primary environmental strategy. Compact, well-considered, and built to perform rather than just to look good.

These aren't showpiece projects kept separate from the day-to-day work. They're representative of how we approach every commission.

The Financial Case

The assumption that sustainable design costs significantly more is worth examining carefully. The upfront costs of high-performance fabric, triple glazing, and MVHR are real, but they need to be weighed against the lifetime running costs of the alternative.

Homes we've worked on have seen energy bills reduce by 60 to 90% compared to their pre-retrofit or standard-build equivalents. Over the lifetime of a building, that compounds into a substantial figure. Durable, breathable materials also tend to require less maintenance than cheaper alternatives, and there's a growing body of evidence that EPC ratings are increasingly legible to buyers in London's property market: a high-performing home is a materially different asset to a low-performing one, and that gap is widening.

Government incentive schemes for retrofits and renewable technologies are also evolving. It's worth understanding what's available at the point you're planning your project rather than assuming the economics won't stack up.

Technology in Its Proper Place

We integrate solar panels and battery storage, air source heat pumps, MVHR, rainwater harvesting, and low-embodied-carbon materials including CLT, recycled steel, lime plasters, and timber cladding. These systems matter and we know how to specify and integrate them properly.

But technology is the second conversation, not the first. The first is about fabric: how well the building holds heat, how controlled the air movement is, how the structure and orientation work with the climate rather than against it. Get the fabric right and the technology becomes more efficient. Skip the fabric and the technology is compensating for avoidable losses.

This sequencing is something we're direct about with clients from the outset, because it affects which decisions need to be made when.

How We Work

We start with a proper conversation about what you want the building to do, not just what you want it to look like. From there we develop a design strategy that integrates spatial thinking, energy performance, and material quality from the first sketch rather than treating them as separate workstreams.

We use 3D modelling and energy simulation throughout the design process, which means you can see and interrogate the design before anything is built. We work closely with structural engineers, energy consultants, and specialist contractors, and we maintain involvement through construction to ensure that what was designed is what gets built. The gap between design intent and built performance is where sustainable projects most often fall short. Closing that gap is a significant part of what we do.

What Sets RISE Apart

There are talented sustainable architects in London. What we'd point to at RISE is the combination of Passivhaus accreditation with a genuine commitment to design quality, a practice-wide preference for retrofit and adaptive reuse over demolition, and a track record of delivering performance-led projects at a range of scales, from a single Victorian terrace to a community cinema.

We're also honest about what we don't know and direct about where the risks and trade-offs lie on any given project. That tends to make for better working relationships and better buildings.

Building for the Future

At RISE, we think the distinction between sustainable architecture and good architecture is largely false. Buildings that are warm in winter, cool in summer, cheap to run, healthy to live in, and built from honest materials are just better buildings. The environmental performance is part of what makes them better, not a separate objective imposed on top.

London needs to retrofit the vast majority of its existing housing stock and build its new homes to standards that are currently the exception rather than the rule. That work is already underway. We'd like to be part of it.

If you're planning a home, an extension, a retrofit, or a community project, let's have a conversation about what it could be.