Blog Single

“We’d been doing retrofit for years”

WR-AP has been an architectural practice for about eight years, and refurbishment work — including a fair amount of what would now be called retrofit — has always been part of the mix. What changed, Max told us, wasn’t the work itself. It was the decision to formalise it.

“We’ve been doing retrofit for years — probably not as structured as the PAS 2035 requirements… But when we saw all this funding developing… we thought this isn’t something you can just bolt onto the practice. It requires driving in a certain way: get the qualifications, get a specific mindset, and do this and only this.”

— Max Rengifo

There’s a perception issue behind that decision, too. A practice doing office buildings, housing and retrofit reads as a generalist in what’s now a genuinely expert market — and in a field this technical, generalist isn’t a reassuring word. Splitting retrofit out into its own arm solves that, Max says, “without WRAP losing anything.”

The maths behind the decision

The commercial case is straightforward, and it’s the same case most of the sector is quietly making: by 2050, most of the buildings the UK will still be using already exist, and they need to get close to net zero. That isn’t a niche retrofit specialism sitting alongside new-build work. For a practice of WR-AP’s size, it’s arguably the larger of the two markets already.

“WRAP, building new buildings, probably won’t have as much work as retrofit. So having those two working hand in hand is a good financial proposition for us.”

— Max Rengifo

Why being architects first is the advantage

Most organisations moving into retrofit are multidisciplinary contractors or consultancies — not architects. That matters more than it might sound, because a huge proportion of retrofit work still runs into planning: changing windows, external insulation, anything touching a conservation area or a listed building. Somebody still needs to be an architect for that conversation, regardless of who holds the retrofit qualifications.

“The fact that we’re architects, and we know how to deliver complex projects, lets us land naturally in this new market and gives people confidence that we know what we’re doing.”

— Max Rengifo

He makes a second, less obvious point about the qualifications themselves. A lot of programme managers are coming through the same PAS 2035 courses our retrofit team has completed — but the coursework leans heavily on programme management, with the building-physics content sitting alongside it rather than underneath it.

“A lot of programme managers may not know what sits behind the technicalities, whereas an architectural practice goes into that market naturally.”

— Max Rengifo

Fabric first, or “fabric fifth”?

There’s a live argument in the industry between “fabric first” — improve the building envelope before you touch heating or generation — and what some are now calling “fabric fifth”: decarbonise first (heat pump, solar, grid), and come back to insulation later. Max is unambiguous about which side of that argument he’s on, and he explains it with an analogy WR-AP uses often enough that it’s become a kind of house style.

“If you want to go on a long hike you need to go well prepared, with proper layers. Otherwise you lose all your energy in the first hour and you’re back to the start. You can carry all the protein bars you want — 200 bananas — it won’t help you get to the end. A house is similar: if you don’t wrap it, you can pump in all the energy you want, but you’re wasting it.”

— Max Rengifo

Underneath the analogy sits a genuine practical problem: the electricity grid isn’t built for the load that mass heat-pump adoption implies, and clean electricity is still expensive electricity. Which is why, in Max’s framing, retrofit isn’t really about one thing — it’s about three, working together.

“If you have people in social housing, and you take the boiler out and put in a beautiful heat pump but don’t do the fabric, the bill goes up. Clean, yes. Efficient, arguable. Cheaper — never.”

— Max Rengifo

Reduce consumption first, decarbonise the grid second, and — the reason WR-AP’s two main client groups sit where they do — tackle energy poverty third. There’s a wrinkle even inside the official targets, Max points out: the policy goal is EPC C by 2030, but a heat pump can occasionally send a property’s EPC rating down, because the metric is sensitive to running cost, not just carbon.

“If you put a heat pump in, your EPC can go down, because your energy cost goes up. At the moment it’s like a Tetris with holes that don’t sink.”

— Max Rengifo

He adds a fourth strand that doesn’t always make the funding business case, but arguably should: healthy homes. Badly sequenced retrofit — insulation without ventilation, in particular — is exactly what produced the mould and damp problems the sector is now working hard to undo.

“It’s beautifully wrapped — but it’s like going on your hike with a plastic bag from the supermarket. You’re dry, but you’re sweating inside.”

— Max Rengifo

Where PAS 2035 actually came from

It’s worth understanding why PAS 2035 is as strict as it is about sequencing and named accountability, because it wasn’t written in a vacuum.

“Do you know the story behind PAS 2035:2023? It’s the result of the fiasco of the previous funding schemes — ECO and the rest. It wasn’t that there was no expertise, or no money, or that people applied for the wrong thing. It was about how, from beginning to end, these things were coordinated. You can’t go to stage two without having stage one signed off — similar to the fire-safety gateways at the moment.”

— Max Rengifo

The industry’s real perception problem

Ask Max what gets in the way of a good retrofit conversation with a client or a peer, and the answer isn’t technical. It’s reputational — and it’s inherited from exactly the kind of badly sequenced schemes described above.

“The perception is: they did it in the council next door, everybody’s complaining, people are sick now, and the bills went through the roof.”

— Max Rengifo

The correction he makes is one worth repeating to any client who assumes retrofit means scaffolding, disruption and a five-figure bill arriving all at once.

“It’s costly and disruptive if not properly done. And the other good thing is you can have a plan ahead of you: you don’t need to change the boiler now, you can change it in seven years. You have a plan for each property, or a number of properties. Retrofit isn’t just going there and doing everything in one go — that’s a misconception too.”

— Max Rengifo

What “properly done” looks like in practice usually comes down to something far more human than a spec sheet. Max’s go-to example is loft insulation — on paper, the simplest measure in the entire PAS 2035 toolkit.

“You’re in a row of terraced houses and you say ‘we need to do loft insulation, happy days, we can do that tomorrow.’ The problem is nobody thought about the day it happens. Loft insulation takes one morning — just do it — but nobody went up to the loft first. They go up and find it’s full of the resident’s things. She doesn’t want anyone touching them, and nobody told her she’d need to move them. All of that is what we call engagement.”

— Max Rengifo

Why residents decide whether a programme actually works

Funding, qualifications and a good design team get a programme to site. Whether it succeeds once it’s there, in Max’s view, comes down to one variable that’s much harder to procure.

“You can get the funding… you can get the right team around you — but if you don’t have the residents on your side, you’re bothered. It’s going to be a disaster. As simple as that.”

— Max Rengifo

The kind of information that changes an outcome isn’t always in a survey. Max’s example, from a regeneration scheme, is the sort of detail no desktop assessment would ever surface.

“In a regeneration, they said nobody walks left from this road — there’s a very tall building and the wind is horrible, so everybody walks the long way round, even though it’s further. Nobody knows that from a desktop study.”

— Max Rengifo

Knowing how people actually move around an estate, he points out, matters for something as practical as where a contractor’s compound and site access go — not just for the sociology of the thing.

What success looks like a decade from now

Asked to look further out, Max’s answer wasn’t about a single scheme or a single client — it was about the shape of the market itself. His honest assessment is that public funding, on its own, was never going to be enough.

“Public money won’t be able to do it… What you really want is to make this work, legislate it well, and make it a proven, successful story for private funds to inject money into.”

— Max Rengifo

In that future, the advice to anyone weighing up a retrofit career is the same regardless of where they’d come in — as a consultant, a coordinator, or an installer on the tools.

“It’s a no-brainer: get trained, on anything, and we’re doing it here at every level… You’re not going to have an AI agent installing insulation in the eaves of old homes. So it covers loads across the industry: electrical improvements, plumbing, you name it — it’s everywhere.”

— Max Rengifo

Want to talk to Max and the team about your own programme? Get in touch, or find out more about who we are.