From their annual ‘Plants and Pints’ to a house designed for trees and cats, Office S&M are making regenerative design fun, creative, and an intuitive characteristic of contemporary practise.

Buildings.
Vivienne Ugwudike, Megan Spoor, Catrina Stewart, Hugh McEwen, and Jade Huang, at The Tate Institute; an Office S&M retrofit of a locally listed heritage building in Royal Docks, Newham.

We believe being green doesn’t need to be grey. To date, this has resulted in delivering extensions made almost entirely of cork, a net zero in-operation retrofit of a community space, and a circular economy and natural material retrofit to deliver new apartments.

Our office contains more plants than people, to harness the benefits ofbiophilia. We have annual ‘Plants and Pints’ sessions to re-pot and tend to the plants and ourselves. We get our best work done in our office space, where we have conducted wellbeing audits. This ensures the studio is human-centric, through filtered air and drinking water, standing desks, and joyfulcolours.

We often challenge clients, both to think in new ways and to expose them to innovative solutions. With Park House, we used screw piles, timber structure, and timber finishes to create an extension which treads lightly, while the interior and exterior are designed as much for non-humans – in particular trees and cats – as for humans. The Tate Institute uses timber mined from the building itself to repair parts of the roof. These are fixed with bolted connections on lime mortar-bedded walls to support future disassembly when the building needs repair.

While there are changes we can make as individuals – one of the simplest we made was all CPD food we order is vegan – the most impact we can have is as designers where our effect is magnified over 250 times. To this end, we sponsor the ACAN Natural Material Detail Library, and knowledge share the materials and suppliers used in our projects.

Office S&M
London N16

Buildings.

All photographs in the Reinventing Practice series will be on show at Regenerative Design 2026,  a month-long programme of exhibitions and events that takes place at the Building Centre throughout October 2026.