RISE Design Studio

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

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.

Planning approved! 🎾
RISE Design Studio has secured consent for a new low-carbon clubhouse for in Sutton, London - designed as a contemporary mass timber pavilion to AECB CarbonLite New Build standard.
To celebrate, the team has written a guide for any sports club committee considering a new facility: what to ask your architect, how to approach planning, why sustainability saves money in the long run, and why getting your brief right matters more than your budget.
Link in bio.
Visuals by Gabriel Spera. Project team: Jose Dengra, Imran Jahn