Changing the system, not just the project: why we’re UKGBC members.
Membership badges are easy to collect. Logos in a footer cost relatively little for the collective impact they can reflect, but they say little sitting there. So it’s worth explaining why our UKGBC membership sits alongside our SKArating development partnership and our Interior Design Declares commitment — why we engage with it and what we actually do with it.
The question that has shaped how we work isn’t how do we do an excellent sustainable interior fit-out? We know how to do that. It’s what must change so that any competent team, on an ordinary budget (if there is such a thing), with no passion for the subject, produces a good outcome by default?
That is a systems question and needs a systems answer: shared performance measurement everyone is held to, guidance that turns evidence into instructions, standards that enable claims that can be tested, and eventually regulation that defines standard performance. None of these can be built by a single practice, and all of them can be built by an industry that organises itself — which is what we work towards and find the UKGBC exists to do, and why we’re members of it.
Pioneering means being early, working on something before there is a market for it
Pioneering is one of our values, and we’d rather define it honestly than decoratively. It doesn’t mean novelty for its own sake. It means being willing to work on something before there is a market, a mandate or a fee for it — because the things that eventually shift the whole system always look premature at the point where the work has to be done.
That’s not a comfortable position. Early work is unbilled, frequently ignored, and offers no guarantee it will ever be adopted. It’s also the only point at which a small practice can influence something much larger than itself. By the time an idea is obvious, it belongs to committees.
Our involvement with UKGBC follows that pattern, and it started long before we joined anything.
What we understand the UKGBC is for
The UK Green Building Council describes itself as a membership-led industry network working to radically transform the sustainability of the built environment. It’s a charity with a network now well over 700 organisations strong, spanning the entire value chain — developers, contractors, investors, manufacturers, consultants and designers.
Two things make that structure matter to us.
First, reach across the market, industry and supply chain. Sustainability in interiors fails at the initial briefing stage and all the way to the handovers: from conversations between clients and interior designers, between landlords and tenants, between designers and contractors, between specification and what actually is built on site. The UKGBC is a network that drives and facilitates all of those stakeholders, their relationships and where issues can be fixed rather than complained about.
Second, influence on policy. UKGBC engages members in advocating a progressive message to government and is directly involved in informing and shaping green building policy. Its mission areas — climate change mitigation, climate resilience, nature, resource use and circular economy, and health, wellbeing and social value — read almost exactly like our own scope of work. This enables us to support policy work that aligns with our values and aims but is out of reach and resource for a practice such as ours.
It’s why we joined and we stay and renew every year.
The rungs that change more than one project
It helps to be specific about where leverage sits. Sustainable outcomes in the built environment get locked in at six levels, each one governing everything below it:
- The project — one building, one client, one team.
- The practice — how a firm briefs, specifies and argues, applied across its whole portfolio.
- Tools and benchmarks — shared measurement that lets any team set a target and prove it hit one.
- Guidance — evidence turned into something a non-specialist can follow on a Tuesday afternoon.
- Standards — agreed definitions, so “net zero” for example means a testable thing rather than a marketing position.
- Regulation — the floor beneath which nobody can go, whether or not they care.
Most sustainability efforts have concentrated on rung one, which is where it’s most visible but least durable. Ove the last 20 years we’ve deliberately worked at every rung: projects and consultancy, our own practice, in industry benchmarks such with SKArating since 2008, contributed to UKGBC guidance, the standards conversation now reshaping interior fit-outs, and — through UKGBC’s advocacy — the case for regulation and national policy.
The higher rungs are slower, less glamorous and almost never attributed to anyone. They’re also where a decision made once quietly improves thousands of projects that will never know our name. That trade is worth making.
Where our work meets UKGBC’s aims
Whole life carbon — the layer that gets replaced most often
We are Whole Life Carbon (WLC) specialists for interiors, and interiors are where a disproportionate amount of avoidable carbon lives. A structure might stand for a century; an interior fit-out is frequently replaced, on a cycle between five to fifteen years, and in every one of those cycles is a fresh round of embodied carbon, where almost none of it appears in the headline figures people quote about their spaces.
UKGBC’s position is that legislation to measure and limit embodied carbon needs to arrive at the earliest opportunity, alongside decarbonised material supply chains and reduced demand for new construction through design efficiency, reuse and circularity. That last clause is our day job. Measuring Whole Life Carbon on interior fit-out projects, setting reduction targets that survive ‘value engineering’, and challenging the assumption that a lease event or the dilapidations process requires a strip-out — is how their aim becomes a project outcome within our practice.
Circular Economy and Material Resource Management
Construction and demolition account for the majority of the UK’s material use and waste generation. In interiors specifically, the wins are unglamorous and enormous: retaining raised floors and suspended ceilings, reusing partitions and joinery, keeping existing furniture and fittings, specifying for disassembly from the start so the next client and designer inherit an asset rather than a skip.
As part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation community and as UKGBC members, we work these principles into briefs at the earliest stage — because circularity decided at RIBA Stage 4 is mostly theatre. Decided at Stage 1, it changes the budget, the programme and the resource efficiency achieved.
Health & wellbeing — where we started
This is the part of the agenda we’ve been closest to for longest, and the reason we’re in the network at all.
2010: starting the conversation. Together with the Feeling Good Foundation – a not-for-profit group, and with colleagues at The Building Centre, Gardiner & Theobald and others across the industry who shared a conviction that was, at the time, distinctly unfashionable — that the design of buildings and interiors has a measurable effect on how people feel, think and function, and that the industry ought to be able to prove it. Over the following three years we hosted a series of sessions sharing wellbeing and evidence-based design knowledge across the sector and market: gathering the research, examining what stood up to scrutiny, and putting it in front of designers, developers and occupiers to raise awareness of why it mattered.
The make-up of that group mattered as much as its subject. Designers alone can produce a persuasive case that no one funds. With clients and cost consultants in the room from the outset, the value question — what does this cost, what does it return, how would you evidence either — was never a later objection to be managed. It was part of the initial enquiry.
There was no policy driver for this and low client demand for it at the time. The certification schemes that now trade on wellbeing didn’t yet exist in the UK market. It was simply a group of practitioners deciding that the evidence deserved an audience and to be put into practice.
Commissioned into guidance. As that work gained traction, the industry’s attention caught up with it. UKGBC began building a formal programme around health and wellbeing, and guides were commissioned to give the sector something it could reference to and apply. We wrote most of the first of the offices guidance — unattributed at the time, as commissioned work often is.
It was a particular kind of task. Rather than asserting that good design is good for people, the guidance had to gather the evidence for which design features demonstrably affect occupants, and set out a framework that owners and occupiers could use to track those impacts and feed them into financial decisions. Every recommendation had to survive contact with people who would need to build it, fund it, let it and operate it. That framework was subsequently adapted for retail, extended to homes, and stress-tested through UKGBC’s Wellbeing Labs, where project teams applied it to real buildings and reported back on what held up.
That was the moment we saw a conversation we’d been convening across a handful of firms became an industry programme with a research budget and a route to policy — which is precisely the argument for being part of an organisation like UKGBC. Good ideas scale through networks, not through individual practices.
Both phases of that work shaped how we practise our own interior design and wellbeing consultancy at Grigoriou Interiors. Three things stuck.
Elina has since carried that thinking into her book Wellbeing in Interiors: Philosophy, Design and Value in Practice and into writing and talks for the V&A, the Wellcome Collection and RICS, alongside our own training courses through Grigoriou Education aimed for designers and architects.
Benchmarking, standards and education
Rung three, and the clearest example of the argument. We’ve supported the development of SKArating since 2008 and we’re a SKArating development partner since then — nearly two decades spent building measurement infrastructure that any interior designer or refurbishment team can pick up, whether or not they’ve ever heard of us. A benchmark is the most democratic thing in sustainability: it hands a small tenant with a modest budget the same yardstick as a portfolio landlord, and it makes vague performance measurable.
Education works the same way, one rung across. UKGBC upskills the industry at scale; we do it team by team through our courses and training, so that clients aren’t dependent on consultants to make good decisions in year three of a lease. Knowledge that stays with the consultant leaves when the consultant does. Knowledge transferred into a client’s own team keeps producing outcomes long after our appointment ends — which is, deliberately, a business model that limits our own repeat work.
The policy changes we’re watching — and why they matter for interiors
Embodied carbon regulation. We’re looking at how embodied carbon moved towards a regulated requirement.
The UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard. Version 1 was published in March 2026 after pilot testing across some 200 real projects, with verification following. For interiors, the significant development is the addition of landlord-only and tenant-only routes to verification. Fit-out and tenant energy use were always the awkward gap in whole-building claims — the landlord doesn’t control them, and the tenant often doesn’t measure them. Delineated routes make occupier interior fit-outs a formally accountable part of a Net Zero claim rather than a footnote. That is a direct change to how our clients will need to brief and evidence their projects.
We have been contributing to the UKNZCBS’s work and the development of the embodied carbon benchmarks for interior fitouts. More on that soon…
Construction products reform and material transparency. UKGBC and its members have fed into government consultation on construction products reform aimed at improving transparency and traceability. Better product data is the precondition for honest specification — without it, embodied carbon assessment is educated guesswork. This also links directly with the systemic work of SKArating and harmonises and aligns our efforts.
Resilience, retrofit and energy. UKGBC’s recent trends work points to resilience, scaled retrofit, closing the performance gap and community-centred approaches as defining themes for the sector. Retrofit-first is a big carbon lever available to most building-owner clients, and it is fundamentally an interiors question: what can an existing space become without knocking it down but refurbishing the interiors to meet current and future needs?
What this means if you work with us
Being in the room has a practical dividend. Our advice anticipates regulation rather than reacting to it. Our benchmarks are the ones the industry is converging on. When a standard shifts — as UKNZCBS did this year — our clients hear it from us before it appears in a tender document.
It also means we’re accountable. Sitting inside a network of 700+ organisations that publish, benchmark and challenge each other makes vague sustainability claims difficult to sustain. We think that’s healthy.
And it means we’ll always be arguing for the thing that outlasts your current project and sets the ground for your next one. If a piece of work can be turned into a method your team keeps, a number your portfolio can be held to, or a case study that changes what the next twenty clients ask for, we’ll push for that — because a project that improves only itself is a project that’s under-used and holding back value.
We began convening conversations about wellbeing and evidence-based design in 2010, when nobody was asking for them. The measure of whether that was worth doing isn’t our own portfolio. It’s how ordinary those ideas have become in everyone else’s.
If you’d like to talk about wellbeing, Whole Life Carbon on an interior fit-out, a retrofit-first strategy, or how the changing standards landscape affects your assets, get in touch.
Grigoriou Interiors are interior designers, consultants and educators specialising in sustainable spaces with wellbeing at heart. We are UKGBC members, SKArating development partners, Interior Design Declares signatories and part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation community. See our full list of press and accreditations.
