Now that people can do so much of their work from home, the office has to earn it’s attendance by giving people a good reason to make the journey in. Offices that get used well share a few things: a sense of joy, good daylight, good acoustics and plenty of places to be social as well as other spaces to focus.

The biggest design factor in a good café is flow, which is how people move from the door to the counter and on to a seat.

Retrofit requires a genuinely different set of skills from new build. That sounds like a simple statement, but its implications run deep: how a practice surveys an existing building, how it thinks about materials, how it understands construction history, how it manages the relationship between old and new fabric, and how it responds to a very different set of site conditions.

Rocca Holly-Nambi is the director of B-Side, an arts organisation based on the Isle of Portland in Dorset. In recent years, b-side has grown from a biennial festival into a year-round cultural offering: embedding artists into heritage sites, projecting onto lighthouses, parading through streets, and now running a bed and breakfast as a community asset and creative retreat. 

Retrofit is the most important idea in British architecture right now. It’s also one of the most misunderstood. At one end, retrofit means a cosmetic refresh — new kitchen, new bathrooms, fresh paint. At the other, it means a deep rethinking of how a building performs, how long it will last, and what it contributes to the world it sits in. These are very different things, and the gap between them matters, both for the client and for the planet.

Cat A and Cat B are the two stages most office fit-outs are described in, and knowing where one ends and the other begins is the key to an getting to the right budget. Most people mean Cat B when they talk about a fit-out, but it is the Cat A condition that decides how far your Cat B budget will go.

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Most people who come to us have already made a decision; they want more space, they want to do it well, and they don’t want to build something they’ll regret in years to come. What they’re often less sure about is what ‘doing it well’ actually means in practice in environmental terms — beyond buying some triple glazing and hoping for the best.

The instinct to start fresh is understandable. The building is tired. The layout doesn’t work. The running costs are eye-watering. And somewhere in the back of your mind is the idea that a clean slate would be easier, better, more efficient than trying to work with what’s there. New is shiny - new is exciting - new is better somehow?

The brief you give your architect at the start of a project determines almost everything that follows. Get it right, and the design process is a genuine collaboration toward a shared goal. Get it wrong, or leave it too vague, and you’ll spend the middle stages of the project renegotiating things that should have been settled at the beginning.

Most of Lewisham was built between 1880 and 1930. Those Victorian and Edwardian terraces, the long streets of Forest Hill, Brockley, Catford and Hither Green, are some of the most robust buildings in London, structurally solid and full of character. They are also, by modern energy standards, significant carbon emitters, with solid walls, single-glazed windows and uninsulated floors that leak heat throughout the colder months.

Material choice is the single biggest decision you’ll make in a sustainable extension. More than the glazing spec, more than the heating system, more than the renewable energy bolt-ons that often get added at the end. Here are the five materials we reach for most often at New Makers Bureau.

Planning permission in London isn’t a single thing. It varies by borough, by conservation area, by the specific character of your street, and sometimes by whoever happens to be sitting across the desk from your application. That said, there are consistent principles and a clear direction of travel, and if you understand them, sustainable design becomes a planning asset.

Lewisham has a rich community and cultural life, from the independent venues of Deptford to the arts organisations of Forest Hill…. community centres serving some of the most diverse neighbourhoods in London and small cultural spaces that punch well above their weight. The architecture that houses all of this matters. It shapes how people feel about their community and whether they want to be part of it.

Retrofit pricing is variable in a way that frustrates clients and, frankly, makes it difficult for architects to give useful guidance without knowing the specific building. That said, there are principles and benchmarks that can help you understand the range, and, more usefully, understand what drives the difference.