Our Specialism
SE3Design are architects, designers, project managers and Passivhaus consultants. We work collaboratively to help create sustainable, healthy, low energy and resource efficient environments for our clients.
Our architecture is about people and the living and working environments we create for us and future generations to come. It is about how our environment impacts on us and how we impact on the environment – in other words ‘Socio-ecological design’.
Passivhaus Experts - Reliably low energy design
There is no doubt - the environmental impact from construction, our lifestyles, rising carbon emissions, rising fuel prices and fuel poverty remain the key challenges when it comes to sustainable building design.
The UK has the oldest building stock in Europe and one of the least energy efficient (Eurostat data). The poor efficiency of our housing stock is the principal cause of high energy bills and the main cause of fuel poverty, with 4.5 million households struggling to pay their energy bills and facing the dire choice of having to heat or eat.
It also contributes to the UK’s appalling track record on excess winter deaths, when taking into account cold weather beyond just the winter months, the UK ranks second-worst out of 30 European countries.
We specialise in healthy, low energy building design. As part of the team we employ some of the first certified Passivhaus designers in the UK who also helped deliver the UK’s first multi-residential certified Passivhaus. Since then they have been involved as architects and Passivhaus designers with the delivery of more than 200 Passivhaus dwellings, offices and schools and the UK’s first Passivhaus public pool and leisure.
By applying the latest, leading standards in energy efficient, healthy building design our projects deliver high performance, uplifting, more profitable and more economic buildings at a fraction of the fuel costs and with greatly reduced carbon emissions.
Our Team
SE3D are a design lead team of RiBA chartered Architects. We employ an integrated, collaborative approach to building design where key principles of healthy, low energy and sustainable design are considered from the outset and where architecture and engineering solutions complement each other to offer pragmatic, practical and economic solutions.
Where the architectural design is developed independently from other disciplines often the engineering becomes a problem fix for any short falls. Often building modelling happens too late in the project where the building design is already fixed and the full potential cannot longer be achieved resulting in more expensive over engineered renewables and services strategies.
Our team includes some of the most experienced Passivhaus designers in the UK who have been involved with residential, commercial, offices, schools and leisure Passivhaus projects from inception through to completion.
We provide full design services or Passivhaus consultancy services and believe in collaboration and sharing our experience from having delivered low environmental impact developments and Passivhaus’es. We are able to act as airtightness champions and assist in the training of contractor’s and subcontractor’s staff.
The practice employs Building Biology consultants registered with the IBN (Institut for Building Biology), qualified to assess and design buildings in accordance with SBM 2015 one of the most stringent environmental performance standards for healthy building design.
Healthy Building Experts
Healthy, Human Focussed Design - It’s about System Thinking.
Most of modern life is spent indoors. About a third of our life - on average 28 years - we spend asleep in our bedrooms. Still, we surround ourselves with construction materials that contain myriads of petrochemical additives some of which are known to be carcinogenic, mutagenic and repro-toxic. At these exposure times even small concentrations of harmful substances can have major health impacts. Chemical offgasing and air pollution has been linked to cancer, asthma, stroke and heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and changes linked to dementia.
We make very conscious decisions about what we eat, how we keep fit and what we give to our children but often neglect our immediate living environment. Here the focus is often purely on costs or it’s simply taken as a given.
At the same time well designed buildings can create healthier, more productive and more economic living and working environments. Improved air quality can reduce sick rates and improve staff productivity. Low VOC (volatile organic compounds) and reduced airborne dust can reduce the risk of asthma cases and improve learning experience in schools. Research has shown that better daylight and visual connections to outside nature improve user confidence and productivity.