Wellbeing

Designing to enhance wellbeing, whether that’s for employees in a workspace or residents in an estate redevelopment, means designing to improve quality of life. As mechanical, electrical and public health (MEP) engineers, we always design with people’s comfort in mind – making sure a building is well-lit, well-ventilated, warm enough in winter, and cool enough in summer. Our wellbeing team take things one step further, and focus on the intangibles of happiness at home or in the office: things like privacy in personal or domestic spaces; navigable public spaces; greenery and access to nature; ease of personalisation; and feelings of ownership.

Colour photo showing inside of Soil Association office during the day.

Wellbeing leaders

Total of 3 people

Henry Pelly

BA MPhil MSc
Principal Sustainability Consultant
Partner

Hero Bennett

MSci MPhil MCIOB CEnv
Director, Sustainability
Partner

Lidia Guerra

MEng CEng MCIBSE
Senior Engineer
Partner

About wellbeing

Max Fordham’s wellbeing consultants are accredited professionals in internationally recognised wellbeing certifications like WELL and Fitwel, and we are happy to guide our clients through the process of achieving these. Where possible, however, we like to go beyond the box-ticking of official accreditations towards a more holistic way of embedding and achieving enduring wellbeing measures in masterplans, houses, and workspaces.

On projects where we are providing wellbeing consultancy, we draw on our in-house expertise in environmental psychology, public health, and urban design, as well as in MEP engineering for low-carbon, low-energy buildings. Getting involved at the earliest, brief-setting project stages, we help our clients define wellbeing priorities and aspirations for their masterplans or buildings. We collaborate closely with both the wider design team and stakeholders (especially residents and building users) to identify those small, intangible design decisions that can have the biggest, most positive impact on inhabitants’ happiness.

Case studies

Total of 2 projects

The Soil Association Headquarters

Colour photo of Soil Association interior, focused on a small blackboard showing handwritten comments from occupants saying what they love about their new building.

We worked with Askew Cavanna Architects to open up and redesign the interior spaces of the Soil Association’s headquarters in Bristol to create a modern workspace. Central to the brief and to the MEP designs was staff wellbeing – articulated in a series of staff workshops. For the Soil Association’s staff, a truly sustainable building was one that people like being in. We provided an early-stage collaborative service centred on our Wellbeing Canvas. Through the associated workshop we identified the positive attributes in the Association’s working culture that should be maintained, as well as the key areas where there was room for improvement. We translated these key points into a single page Wellbeing brief that was used to inform and monitor the design right through until construction. The outcome of our work is an office that responds more effectively to user needs, and (as evidenced by feedback) creates a pleasant and appreciated work environment.

The Entopia Building

Two women stand beside a large window in a light-filled office.

This world-first deep retrofitted sustainable office building sets new standards for low energy use, carbon emissions and impact on natural resources, while actively improving user experience and wellbeing. This former 1930s telephone exchange in Cambridge has been transformed into an ultra-low carbon sustainability hub for the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). It is also home to Canopy, a workspace and community for sustainability-focused startups, small and medium-sized enterprises. We provided wellbeing consultancy on this project, which is targeting WELL Gold.

All services

All buildings should be comfortable and a pleasure to be in: warm, well-lit, well-ventilated, well-used, and well-loved. Our mechanical and electrical engineering, vertical transportation, acoustics, daylight, and lighting design services can help ensure just that. We maximise passive measures such as natural ventilation and daylighting, seamlessly dovetailing our designs with the building’s own form and architecture to result in simple, low-energy, and low-cost building services.
In the face of an increasingly urgent climate emergency, it’s crucial that buildings consume as little energy as possible in their operation. Low energy, low carbon, and low operational costs are our watchwords when it comes to designing new buildings or retrofitting existing ones. We help our clients build sustainability goals into masterplans or early-stage feasibility studies, decarbonise existing estates, and optimise how a building performs against its targets for sustainability and user comfort.
Meeting net zero carbon targets and minimising a building’s impact on the environment means reducing embodied carbon – the carbon tied up in the materials like steel, concrete, and plastic that go into a building’s construction and services design – as much as operational carbon (the carbon a building produces in its heating, cooling, and lighting). We facilitate material reuse with circular economy strategies, steer low embodied carbon design from the earliest project stages with whole life carbon assessments, and offer advice on planning and compliance, all helping to reduce the carbon footprint of construction.