Founder of developer Fabrix explains the company’s approach to breathing new life into neglected corners of the city and the qualities it looks for in an architectural practice.

How did Fabrix come into being, and what makes it different from other developers?

Fabrix was started in 2016 with the objective of bringing together high impact real estate strategies and institutional capital. We wanted to demonstrate that investors can still make high returns without sacrificing the environment, happiness of people or quality of design along the way. The team felt the traditional investment/development community too often undervalued design, nature, communities, use of materials and wellbeing, which thankfully is starting to shift. There are great developers out there but I guess looking at our team I would say that what sets Fabrix apart is the individual commitment of everyone across the business to achieving positive impact in an authentic way, whether they’re responsible for corporate finance, investment, development or asset management. It’s back to that purpose of connecting institutional capital with huge impact whilst meeting financial return criteria.

What are the particular challenges involved in repurposing buildings for unidentified future users and a wide range of possible uses?

Repurposing an existing building comes with a thousand and one choices – looking at everything from building fabric, volume, structural integrity, natural light – the bones of the building essentially. A common challenge is you never quite know what you’re going to find when you start. But while there are risks associated with that, it’s those existing constraints and surprises which often spark the most creative responses and that can really make a project.

Creating flexibility for future uses on the one had comes down to properly understanding the needs of your possible occupiers – getting under the bonnet of what drives their business and requirements. And on the other, designing flexibility in to create a long-life loose-fit approach.

One of our first London projects – The Binary – is a perfect example. A former police building in Bankside that we acquired at the start of 2018 and that definitely ticked the ugly box. It is now 14,000sq ft of office space, let to tenants including the likes of Leon. To breathe life into the structure, we introduced new feature glazing across the entire perimeter to deliver light, height and volume, installed electric boilers, and transformed a former car park into The Yard – a small but incredibly popular outdoor landscaped space for tenants. That space is also open to the local neighbourhood – hosting dozens of events a year – and demonstrating that every building, no matter how big or small, can deliver community value.

Roots in the Sky (above) seeks to set the blueprint for the next generation of global HQ office buildings – weaving together sustainable development, biodiversity and inclusivity. 

How have you developed a business model that allows for the level of uncertainty, particularly with regard to timeline and cost, that is part and parcel of repurposing existing buildings?

Our reuse-first ethos means we’re best known for our work in repurposing buildings, but our experience is across both new-build and retrofit and we have developed a resilient business model that sits behind that. Key is having our own fund and controlling our own equity, allowing us to transact quickly and reliably, which means we can buy buildings cheaper.

Underlying everything is our ability to identify where there are underserved needs and delivering them in a way that has a positive social and environmental impact as well as strong financial returns – whether that’s reuse or ground-up development.

Our investors back us for exactly that reason – embracing the opportunity to invest in real estate in a more socially and environmentally conscious way. They trust us to deliver buildings and places that contribute to London as a diverse, vibrant and cultured city – that means being willing to take risks and embrace buildings and projects that others might not have the appetite for.

We put a big emphasis on being data-led and will analyse risk from every direction, helping us to inform our decisions. And we buy assets at their most underutilised, which other investors tend to shy away from. There’s reward in that and we regard the opportunity to create low-carbon buildings as a massive de-risk.

We get a kick out of taking buildings, often the uglier the better, and transforming them into something that gives back to their future users but, just as importantly, the city more widely, the community they sit within and the natural environment.

A former stationery office and later a Crown Court, the 1960s Roots in the Sky building has been adapted to provide office space with generous volumes and adaptable floor plates of up to 45,000 square feet.

A question that will be of particular interest to our readership is how do you select your architects and landscape architects?

Aligning on values is super important to us to retain our goals of building better – ultimately we seek out those that design the opposite of cookie-cutter developments. Across our portfolio we are working with world-class consultants of all scales from both the UK and further afield, whether that’s Haworth Tompkins or MVRDV. It’s about people that are driven to push the boundaries, innovate and do things differently. And also supporting those emerging practices, with talent, that may need a break on larger projects.

We actually lead on a lot of the early design-work ourselves, through our own in-house Studio Fabrix, to help deeply communicate our vision and brief – it’s a part of the process that is incredibly important to us. We want collaborators that share our vision, creativity and passion.

Is your sense that architects have the necessary skills to assist you with the kind of work that you do? If not, where is the skills gap?

There is an opportunity for growth and up-skilling across the board. Architects are instrumental in how we design better buildings, public realm and cities. However, the climate emergency and the urgent need to reduce our carbon consumption as an industry means that the role of structural and M&E engineers are becoming even more critical – there’s a sense that the ecosystem is shifting.

Embedding circular economy principles across the industry is also critical, which requires in some ways turning the entire design process on its head – designing and specifying based on the materials available as the starting point and baking in demountability.

In our experience though, the consultants we work with are ahead of the game on all this and are jumping at the chance to put these principles into practice – the barrier hasn’t been the knowledge, creativity and innovation across the industry but rather the lack of appetite for risk and doing things differently from developers.

What’s the one thing an architect could say or do that would make you think they’re not the right practice for you?

Having zero aspirations to be innovative – whether that be through design, materials, processes, or collaboration – or lacking the appetite to be flexible and test a range of ideas through the design process. Having a sense of humour is also key for us. And respect for the voices of other members of the project team.

The 1.4 acre rooftop ‘Roots in the Sky’ Urban Forest will include 125 mature trees, 10,000 plants and over 1,000 tonnes of soil.

You’re delivering London’s first urban forest rooftop, Roots in the Sky. Can you tell us a bit about how this project came into being, and the challenges involved?

Roots in the Sky seeks to set the blueprint for the next generation of global HQ office buildings – weaving together sustainable development, biodiversity and inclusivity. The 430,000 sq ft Net Zero building will be topped with a 1.4 acre rooftop Urban Forest – 125 mature trees, 10,000 plants and over 1,000 tonnes of soil. And the highest value part of the rooftop, with views over the City of London and the Shard, will be dedicated to community use.

We bought the site from the Ministry of Justice pre-COVID but had already identified that offices in the main were no longer fit for purpose – something we were determined the project would not only address but turn on its head. One of the key Studio Fabrix concepts that has driven the project from day one was solving how to create space for nature in cities given they’re effectively covered in concrete. Our solution is to use the roof but the differentiator is that it had to be in a meaningful way – not via a token 20cm of soil and trees living stunted lives in pots.

When we first started this project, our peers thought that we were crazy and that we were embarking on an impossible journey. Fast forward to today, occupiers are voting with their feet and our scheme is being held up for setting an entirely new standard in commercial office development, where tenants are an integral part of the local community, and office buildings give back to their local area and the natural environment.

What other projects are you working on?

We are close to completing the second phase of our Berlin scheme, Atelier Gardens – the sensitive repurposing of the Berliner Union Film Ateliers (BUFA) film studios – one of the oldest in Europe. We’re hugely proud of the project’s award-winning approach to reuse and renaturing and the changemaker campus we’ve created, which has brought together activist organisations across climate change, social justice and food production, such as Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future and Danish alternative business school Kaospilot, alongside global media and production companies and corporates, including Netflix and Amazon, across a flexible mix of studio, work and event spaces,  sitting within a pioneering green landscape, where plants are being specified to decontaminate the soil.

The Bottle Factory in Southwark, the venue for the recent Architecture Today Awards party, was a Victorian mineral water, lemonade and ginger beer bottling warehouse that had become derelict before Fabrix transformed it into workspace for new and old creative industries. 

Can you tell us a bit about The Bottle Factory in Peckham? How did it come on your radar? What’s interesting about its history? What do you envisage for its future?

The Bottle Factory is a former mineral water, lemonade, and ginger beer bottling Victorian warehouse built in the 1890s, located just off the Old Kent Road in Southwark. The building had been through a variety of uses following J Mills & Sons closure in the sixties and was vacant and derelict when we bought it just before the pandemic. It was also at risk of demolition, with other potential purchasers looking to redevelop for residential use.

In line with our re-use first ethos and approach to breathing life back into underused and overlooked urban spaces, our focus has been on stripping back all the unsympathetic interventions and improving operational efficiency to restore it to its Victorian glory, creating a flexible, healthy and empathetic environment for industrial and creative uses, old and new.

It’s an approach we’ve taken consistently as we’ve built up our London portfolio. Taking unloved buildings, introducing light and operational energy improvements, and carving out space for nature and events, that we then work hard to activate in partnership with local organisations. The core ingredients, we think, for creating buildings where people actually want to be that are embedded in, and give back, to their local neighbourhood.

What made you keen to host the Architecture Today Awards for buildings that stand the test of time?

Hosting the event was a natural fit. Not only because of the building’s history, but also because it’s one of our commitments as a developer and investor to reclaim buildings, breathe new life into them and help reshape their future for generations to come.

What’s next?

We’ve got big ambitions. We will be developing more Roots in the Sky projects across London and other gateway cities in Europe – responding to the flight to quality in the office market generally and the recognition that office buildings need to do more.

We’ll also be applying the ‘Fabrix way’ – embedding culture, nature, community, technology and high-quality design – to new sectors. Tackling both the lack of sustainable practices in industrial and logistics supply chains, and the affordability crisis in residential. We’re already underway in building new specialist teams – so watch this space!