Sustainability
Buildings designed to run on less, last longer, and tread lighter.
Our Position
The most sustainable building is the one you don't have to rebuild
Sustainability in architecture is often reduced to three things: insulation, solar panels and heat pumps. Those matter, but they are only part of the picture.
Real sustainability is about longevity: buildings that are adaptable, well made, beautifully proportioned, so they remain loved and useful for a century, not fifty years. It's also about embodied carbon: the CO₂ locked into the materials we choose, before the building has even been heated for the first time.
We design fabric-first, low-energy buildings as standard. But we also think about the whole life of the building, and the long-term cost of the choices we make today.
How We Think About It
Eight principles, before any specification
Sustainability is an architectural question before it is a technical one. These are the principles that shape every Woods project: the specification follows from them.
- Longevity
- We design for the century, not the planning cycle: buildings good enough to keep, so they are never the ones that have to be rebuilt.
- Adaptability
- Plans and structures that can change as life and business change: a building's first use should not be its last.
- Material Provenance
- Materials chosen for where they come from and how they age: natural, local where possible, honest about their origins.
- Embodied Carbon
- The carbon locked into the fabric matters as much as the energy in use. We weigh it in every material decision.
- Passive Design
- Orientation, daylight, shading, thermal mass: the quiet moves that make a building comfortable before any system switches on.
- Landscape
- Buildings designed with their ground, not simply placed on it: planting, drainage and ecology treated as part of the architecture.
- Energy
- Fabric first, then efficient systems, then renewables: in that order. Performance designed in, not bolted on.
- Craftsmanship
- Buildings that are well made last longer, weather better and stay loved. Craft is a sustainability strategy.
Standards & Certifications
The benchmarks we work to
The legal minimum for thermal performance in England.
The gold standard for energy performance: buildings that need almost no heating even in UK winters. We can design to full Passivhaus certification or to "Passivhaus principles" (the performance without the paperwork) depending on your ambitions.
The UK's leading targets for operational and embodied carbon. We reference these on every project and track where we sit against them.
Passivhaus-level performance applied to retrofit: particularly relevant for listed and heritage buildings.
For commercial projects, BREEAM ratings (Good / Very Good / Excellent / Outstanding) measure whole-building sustainability. We design to a target rating where your brief requires it.
In Practice
What this looks like on a project
The choices that make a building genuinely sustainable are often invisible in the finished result. Here's a sample of what we specify.
200–300mm insulation in walls and roof. Taped membrane with blower-door testing. U-values of 0.15 or better as standard.
Wood fibre, sheep's wool, cellulose: breathable, low-embodied-carbon materials that outperform foam on lifecycle impact.
Whole-window U-values below 1.0. Correctly oriented to capture solar gain in winter and shade overheating in summer.
No gas connection. Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery maintains fresh air without losing the warmth you've generated.
Roof-integrated solar PV with battery storage where the site suits.
Where feasible, especially on rural and AONB sites, we design for rainwater collection, grey-water reuse and sustainable drainage (SuDS).
Retrofit
The most sustainable project is a well-chosen retrofit
About 80% of the UK buildings that will exist in 2050 have already been built. The largest sustainability challenge of the next two decades isn't new build: it's retrofitting the existing stock to meet the carbon targets without destroying its character.
We love retrofit work. It's harder than new build (fabric constraints, listed building consent, moisture physics, heritage sensitivities) but the carbon saving is enormous. A whole-house retrofit that extends a building's life by 50 years is worth far more, environmentally, than a new "sustainable" house on greenfield land.
Victorian and Georgian retrofit in conservation areas is a particular interest, where performance upgrades need to be invisible and moisture-compatible with the original fabric.
In practice
