Where sustainability and 

wellbeing meet

From award-winning community-first design for older residents to groundbreaking energy efficiency, Hawkins\Brown’s Phil Catcheside talks through how the practice’s projects set a new standard for sustainable, health-focused residential spaces.

“The elements of physical and mental wellbeing are a lens for us as a practice,” says Phil Catcheside, a Partner and Residential Sector Lead with architects Hawkins\Brown, which won the Best Community Living category in the 2024 British Homes Awards for Burridge Gardens Phase 2, a project that also took one of the grand prix prizes for Homebuilder of The Year too.

One of the most notable elements of Burridge Gardens was the careful attention paid to the wellbeing of the older residents within this regenerated 1930s Peabody estate in Wandsworth, south London. Within the scheme there are 54 older person extra care homes, “Some of the residents had lived there for a long time, so we felt it was important to position them at the heart of the project. Their accommodation faces onto the central green space and public square and above the community hub, so there’s that commonality with other users.”

There are communal areas on the third floor of the building housing these residents aged 55 or over. Assisted bathrooms, a laundry, spa and even a hairdressers allow them to be close to the action, “They can go to the hair salon for a bit of a natter with local residents,” says Catcheside, “Interconnecting in this way is a very important part of the building’s function and the shared spaces extend to the outside too.” Above the entrance to the community centre is a ‘tree of modern life’ sculpture, one of several brick artworks planned for each phase of the development, which shows the past, present, and future of the estate and its residents. He adds that the Older Person’s Extra Care building will provide something of a test bed for this kind of urban later living typology, “It will inform how best to have more support as people’s needs change in terms of physical and mental wellbeing.”

There’s an emphasis on sustainability too, in the form of creating homes that use little energy to heat and benefit from solar gain. A mechanical ventilation heat recovery system (MVHR) further reduces residents’ energy use by recovering heat when extracting air while a district heating system provides efficiently heated hot water and heat.

Superior energy performance is also a key part of Hawkins\Brown’s Agar Grove scheme. This masterplan in Camden is home to the largest Passivhaus development in the UK. “It’s putting energy consumption at the top of the agenda, it was a big learning curve,” admits Catcheside, a Certified Passivhaus Designer. “We are looking at how PassivHaus: the use of materials, the way the ventilation works, can be applied to different sectors we work in, such as hospitals. In the case of Agar Grove, building to this standard is good for the council and the tenants, as it reduces running costs.” Residents heating bills could be reduced by up to a 70%, making significant inroads towards fuel poverty and the impact on mental wellbeing that can have.

Considering physical and mental health is ‘reframing the way we think about designing,” says Catcheside finally and in terms of going forward into 2025, it is “resetting our approach to residential.”