Retrofit by DesignBillions of pounds of government funding are now going into retrofit. Pilots and demonstrators have shown what is possible: much lower bills, warmer homes and lower carbon emissions. Scaling those results is the hard part. Approaches that work in a pilot often stall when rolled out across an estate or a region. That gap is the retrofit chasm.
Where design intent gets lost
Housing leaders are committed, the funding exists and the supply chain wants the work. The trouble sits between assessment and delivery, where design intent gets lost.
PAS 2035 created the Retrofit Coordinator role to prevent exactly this, linking strategy, design and work on site. In practice the role is often reduced to a compliance tick-box. Works vary in quality, residents lose faith and retrofit’s reputation suffers. Without coordination led by design, the information that should carry from assessment to site breaks down, and programmes become fragmented and unreliable.
Somewhere between assessment and delivery, design intent is lost.
Crossing the gap
Housing associations need to move from good intentions to consistent delivery. That means giving designers and coordinators the authority to put PAS 2035 into practice:
- Sequence the works fabric first
- Build digital assurance into the process
- Keep residents at the centre of the process
Retrofit by Design was set up to do this. We bring design leadership to retrofit programmes, keep the information intact from assessment through to completion and help housing leaders deliver outcomes at scale.
Retrofit by Design
Design-led retrofit for occupied homes, from assessment to handover.
