RISE Design Studio

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

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

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

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