The nights are drawing in, the trees are up, and the lights are twinkling. It can only mean one thing – Christmas is upon us.
At this time of year, it’s natural to reflect on the last 12 months and we packed a lot in here at SD – below captures a few of our highlights.
We hope your 2024 has been a successful one, and we wish you the very best for 2025. Have a wonderful Christmas and Happy New Year!
In collaboration with Windsor Patania we’re designing Eden House, a large private residence with a basement, turntable, swimming pool, with large cantilevering and fully glazed sections. There’s great emphasis on delivering a sustainable luxury home through an optimised frame design to aid energy efficiency. Natural ventilation, water management, and natural materials will be incorporated, plus 106 solar panels and a ground source heat pump will produce more energy than the home consumes in one year.
A five-storey building with single storey basement on Trinity Road in Wimbledon is under construction and will provide 18 residential units and communal roof terrace. We compiled the Construction Method Statement to gain planning approval for the construction of the basement. The site is a constrained corner plot with the neighbouring building undergoing works at the same time.
We worked with Dowen Farmer Architects to achieve planning for a residential development with landscaped courtyard and ground floor commercial space which replaces an existing petrol station on Forest Road in Walthamstow. To assist with the planning application, we undertook a Flood Risk Assessment of the site and produced a Drainage Strategy incorporating SuDS.
Another beautiful home is Weald House, designed by Mailen Design and Peter Bradford Architects, a private residence in Kent with a 13m wide structural opening to provide uninterrupted views out across the countryside.
Alongside Scapolan Burney Architects we’re working on West India Dock, a nine-storey building to house residential and commercial space within the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Our design uses a pile assisted raft – an efficient foundation type – and so delivers savings in terms of materials, cost, and carbon.
The SD team and a few guests attended the IStructE Structural Award Ceremony in celebration of Mary Ward Centre being shortlisted. And the celebrations continued once we were announced as winners!
As recent graduates of the Heart of the City Climate for SME’s Programme, we were invited to a breakfast event to share our experience with their members. The course educated us on how to count carbon as a practice, and we have since become a carbon neutral business.
We won a competition to redevelop Hastings West Hill, in collaboration with Poroban, for a new timber framed visitor centre for Hastings Castle on a steeply sloping site.
Our Broadwater Road project for Hill is progressing rapidly on site! This development features 128 residential units across a 6/7-storey building with a single basement and podium level. Our design adopts a piled raft slab which reduced the number of piles required by 50% when compared to the original design. Omitting pile caps reduced the construction programme significantly, and optimisation of the frame to reduce the slab thickness saved cost and carbon.
Following the Heart of the City breakfast event, they interviewed us and recorded us at our office as part of a promotional film they’re developing in partnership with Verve TV – home of Student Media at London Metropolitan University.
Every year we gather the whole SD team away from the office for our Summer Fun Day. This year we wandered through Cambridge, refuelled with a delicious lunch, and then punted along the River Cam.
A Central Bedfordshire affordable housing development achieved approval of reserved matters. All of the drainage elements were modelled hydraulically and the site levels were modelled in 3D to aid coordination and ensure the design had a positive impact on the local area and reduced flooding as far as possible.
George Street in the heart of Mayfair is a four-storey building with two-storey basement undergoing a full refurbishment and vertical extension to provide 35,000 sq ft CAT A office space, roof terrace, and event space with Anomaly Architects. We reused and strengthened the existing steelwork within the building to minimise the amount of new structural steelwork brought onto site.
Construction has started on site at Whitechurch Lane – a 20-storey building with 48 apartments, amenity areas, and commercial space, brings life to an underutilised site alongside the historic listed Trumans Brewery on the edge of the City.
In collaboration with PRP, we have successfully delivered the Clichy Estate redevelopment to tender stage. Our design includes a new mosque, residential development of 450 homes, and site-wide drainage design. We undertook a full appraisal of the structural forms, cost, programme, and embodied carbon of Modern Methods of Construction, Glulam/CLT, steel, and reinforced concrete using our in-house plugins for Revit.
We’ve completed the design on another collaboration with Dowen Farmer Architects, East End Road, which will see the addition of a four-storey residential building on an empty site in East Finchley for Manak Homes and will start on site in early 2025. The top floor units are designed for disabled access and so step backs have been designed to accommodate the non-stacking structure. To achieve level thresholds out onto the balconies while accommodating thermal bridging, cranked steel beams were installed while remaining within the slim floor zones.
A few years back we completed Redchurch Townhouse – a hotel and restaurant for Soho House. Since then, our reputation for delivering luxury hotel spaces has been growing and we’re currently working with the Sutton Hotel Collection on an eight-storey extension to the Sheraton Grand London Park Lane with EPR Architects.
Mary Ward Centre has been recognised by the Civic Trust Awards as a Regional Finalist and Finalist for the Selwyn Goldsmith Award for Universal Design 2025. Winners will be announced in March 2025.
Continuing with the CTA’s, Mike, Gem, and Alison were assessment volunteers and visited nine buildings in total. They then submitted a report of each building to be considered by the judges as part of the CTA Application process. Rest assured, we didn’t volunteer ourselves to assess Mary Ward Centre… although it was tempting!
This year we’ve been getting more familiar with the process of reusing steel on projects, with this private home on Merriman Road a key example. Utilising reclaimed steel uses 90% less carbon than recycled steel, but it’s important to remember that reclaimed steel might not always be the most appropriate solution – you must do the calculations to verify capacities and efficiencies first.
Harry attended the Circular Steel event in September and compared notes and experiences with others in the industry to drive more low carbon solutions.
Another project progressing nicely on site is Private Home with Edgley Design – a large new contiguous piled basement, retaining walls along boundary lines, and landscaping on a steeply sloping site in Sevenoaks. The basement forms the development platform for an off-site manufactured three-storey timber framed residence.
A 10-storey commercial building on Great St Helens is currently being refurbished and modernised. Working closely with OD Group, we are vertically extending this central London building using complex analysis to minimise the need for strengthening to the existing structure.
A semi-detached four-storey property on Essex Villas in Kensington will undergo internal alterations including a new basement across the footprint of the building, the addition of a lift, a new rear extension and loft conversion. Our temporary works design ensures efficient coordination with the permanent works – this is particularly useful given the constraints of this tight site.
The featured project that is Mary Ward Centre won an IStructE Structural Award. To be shortlisted, one out of 30, alongside internationally renowned practices like Arup was a HUGE moment for us. And then to win this award – what an achievement! Delivering buildings and spaces that people enjoy using is the ultimate goal for designers. Being recognised with an award is the icing on the cake.