RISE Design Studio

RISE Design Studio RISE Design Studio is an innovative contemporary architect’s practice based in Queen’s Park, West London

We are open as usual - although working from home!

RISE Design Studio is an innovative contemporary architect’s practice based in Queen’s Park, West London

RISE Senior Architect José Dengra spent a day at the weekend at Can Lis, the house Jørn Utzon built for his family on a ...
02/09/2026

RISE Senior Architect José Dengra spent a day at the weekend at Can Lis, the house Jørn Utzon built for his family on a clifftop near Portopetro, Mallorca. It is four stone pavilions linked by open courtyards, with frameless windows cut deep into thick marés walls and furniture built from the same stone as the structure.

The studio has written up what the house teaches about light, material and maintenance, and how those lessons apply to Victorian terraces in London just as well as to a Mediterranean cliff. Photos courtesy of the Can Lis Foundation.

Read it here: https://bit.ly/466ehTl

RISE Design Studio's latest journal piece makes the case for treating solar shading as part of a home's design from the ...
03/07/2026

RISE Design Studio's latest journal piece makes the case for treating solar shading as part of a home's design from the outset, rather than an add-on at the end.

More than half of UK homes are already at risk of overheating, and under 2°C of warming the Climate Change Committee expects that to reach around 90% of existing homes. Air conditioning only adds to the energy and emissions problem. External shading is the passive alternative, and the piece sets out the main types, which approaches suit which orientation, and why external shading always outperforms internal blinds. It also points to the new Shading for Housing guide from the Good Homes Alliance.

Running through it is Ribbon House in Queen's Park, where deep reveals and angled overhangs are the shading.

Read it here: https://bit.ly/4ayT72U

Architecture is not the product. Trust isIn 2011, RISE Design Studio founder Sean Hill believed that if the work was goo...
08/06/2026

Architecture is not the product. Trust is

In 2011, RISE Design Studio founder Sean Hill believed that if the work was good enough, everything else would follow. The first five years taught him otherwise. Clients rarely arrive looking for drawings. They arrive looking for confidence: that someone understands how they want to live, and will guide them through one of the largest commitments of their lives.

The architecture comes later. The trust comes first.

The new RISE Journal piece is an honest account of what he got wrong early on, and the lesson that reshaped the practice. Read it via the link in bio.

https://bit.ly/3RU5PCN

What would a padel court want to be if it looked straight into Regent's Park?A client put that question to RISE Design S...
08/06/2026

What would a padel court want to be if it looked straight into Regent's Park?

A client put that question to RISE Design Studio, and the concept they developed turns the far end of the court into a single full-height glazed wall, framing the park with one mature chestnut at the centre of the view. It draws on the Japanese idea of shakkei, or borrowed scenery, where the landscape beyond becomes part of a space without ever belonging to it.

A warm timber roof of exposed glulam beams brings the colour of the trees indoors and stores carbon while it spans. Pale woven mesh walls keep the ball in play without turning the court into a cage, and a deep green surface answers the canopy outside. Daylight does most of the work, and the open edges keep the court cool through a long rally.

As the studio puts it, the most an architect can do on a site like this is step back and let the trees be the room.

Read the full concept on the RISE Journal:

Two windows. They were never meant to agree with each other.At Douglas House in Kensal Rise, the rear wall of the kitche...
08/06/2026

Two windows. They were never meant to agree with each other.

At Douglas House in Kensal Rise, the rear wall of the kitchen holds a low clerestory slot on one side and a tall up-and-over window on the other. One follows the sun across the birch plywood ceiling. The other pulls in the later light and lifts your eye to the sky.

We won't design a room before understanding how light moves through it. The new Journal piece begins with this room, and the concept sketch drawn long before it was built.

Read it here: https://bit.ly/4xmwwjV

There's a version of a renovation that goes exactly as planned. The contractor delivers. The budget holds. The house bec...
29/05/2026

There's a version of a renovation that goes exactly as planned. The contractor delivers. The budget holds. The house becomes what you imagined.

For that to happen, a lot of quiet things need to be in place before work starts. Insurance is one of them.

Not the box-ticking kind. The kind that actually matches the risk on your specific project. Your standard home insurance was written for a static, occupied house. A renovation changes everything about that.

After a CPD with specialist construction insurance brokers TL Dallas, the team at RISE Design Studio has written a guide to the nine policies that matter. It covers the obvious ones and the ones most homeowners don't know to ask for.

Worth reading before the scaffolding goes up. https://bit.ly/3RAXFz3

At 6am this morning, RISE founder Sean Ronnie Hill was in the Serpentine with client Zoe Birch of Physio Motion, Mayfair...
27/05/2026

At 6am this morning, RISE founder Sean Ronnie Hill was in the Serpentine with client Zoe Birch of Physio Motion, Mayfair. Water temperature 23.7°C. London's heatwave in full effect.

Sean swims here all year round. In January the water is around 4°C. Nearly twenty degrees colder. Same lake, same rope, same jetty. Completely different proposition.

That contrast, between a January swim and a warm May morning, is one of the clearest lessons in thermal comfort he knows. And it leads directly to how RISE thinks about building performance.

The full piece is on the RISE journal. Worth a read if you are thinking about a project where how a space feels matters as much as how it performs. https://bit.ly/4fQ3vXc

Sean Ronnie Hill, founder of RISE Design Studio, visited Matiz Gallery in Barcelona this week and was stopped in his tra...
27/05/2026

Sean Ronnie Hill, founder of RISE Design Studio, visited Matiz Gallery in Barcelona this week and was stopped in his tracks by the work of Adam Weismann of Claymoon Studio.

Weismann's Green Rammed Earth Skyspace is a triptych of unfired clay panels, each compacted layer by layer until compression itself becomes the image. Up close: raw texture, mineral tones, honest material. Across the room: three panels that dissolve into something close to a landscape.

At 65mm deep, the work casts its own shadow. It doesn't pretend to be something it isn't.

For Sean and the team at RISE, where a fabric-first approach to design means thinking hard about materials before systems, encountering work like this matters. These materials carry presence, ecological integrity, and a connection to place that synthetic alternatives simply cannot replicate.

Sean has written about the work and its relevance to how RISE approaches natural materials in architecture. Read the full piece on the RISE journal.

Herbert Paradise, a low-energy EnerPHit retrofit in Kensal Rise by RISE Design Studio, has been featured in a Samsung Ge...
20/05/2026

Herbert Paradise, a low-energy EnerPHit retrofit in Kensal Rise by RISE Design Studio, has been featured in a Samsung Germany campaign promoting their glare-free television technology.

What's interesting about the choice of location isn't the product. It's what Samsung instinctively recognised in the architecture: a quality of calm that comes from building well. Filtered daylight. Natural materials. Stable temperatures. Spatial stillness. All of it the result of a building designed from the fabric outward, with human comfort as the primary brief.

RISE have written about what the collaboration revealed, and what it suggests about where architecture and interiors are heading. Worth a read if you're thinking about how the spaces we inhabit shape the way we feel inside them.

Read the full piece https://bit.ly/3PRZF5t

Most UK homes were built when energy was cheap. That era is overRISE Design Studio's latest piece unpacks why the conver...
04/05/2026

Most UK homes were built when energy was cheap. That era is over

RISE Design Studio's latest piece unpacks why the conversation around rising energy bills so often starts in the wrong place - and what a fabric-first approach to design actually changes.

Passivhaus methodology. EnerPHit retrofit. The right sequence of improvements, in the right order. And the financial data that is now confirming what building science has pointed to for years

The homes being designed well now will cost less to run, hold their value better, and weather the kind of external shocks that have made energy costs so unpredictable

https://bit.ly/42LvShC

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