Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a panel at Footprint+, held in the cathedral-like surroundings of Old Billingsgate Market in London. Footprint+ has become one of the most important gatherings in the UK for people working at the intersection of construction and sustainability, and it was a genuine privilege to be on that stage.
The session was titled Built to Last or Built for Landfill: The Commercial Case for Design for Disassembly, and I was joined by two people whose work I have enormous respect for: Nick Harrison, Director at Design Foundry and a chartered building services engineer with over twenty years of experience delivering some of the largest hospitality MEP projects in the UK, and Brendan Mullard, architect and co-founder of Reassemble, who has spent the last six years building a practice dedicated to circular economy thinking in commercial fit outs. Their work, in different but complementary ways, is some of the most rigorous thinking happening in this space.
What follows is less a transcript and more a set of lessons that emerged from the conversation. They are not new ideas, but the panel sharpened how I think about them, and the way they fit together feels worth writing down.
The problem we kept returning to
Nearly every developer in the room was sitting on a refurbishment liability, whether they had acknowledged it or not. Hotels turn over every seven to ten years. Retail fitouts every one to three. These cycles are not surprises. They are entirely predictable commercial realities, and yet the industry continues to design as if the opening day is the finish line.
The numbers tell the story. On a typical commercial building, structure accounts for around 50% of embodied carbon at year zero. By the time you reach the third refurbishment cycle at year twenty one, fit out has crept up to 57% and structure is down to 25%. The interior is no longer a minor consideration in carbon terms. It is the dominant source of impact over the life of the asset.
Embodied carbon reporting is tightening. Assets with high refurbishment carbon liability will face lender scrutiny and valuation pressure. This is not a future problem. It is a present commercial one.
What Design for Disassembly actually means
The simplest way to describe D4D is this: it is one decision, made at brief stage, that costs nothing extra. Failing to make it costs significantly at year seven, fourteen and twenty one.
In practice it comes down to three principles:
Bolts, then screws, then glues. Bolts enable multiple disassembly cycles. Screws allow one. Glues prevent it entirely. This is the single most impactful decision in a fit out.
Keep materials separate. Don’t bond biological and technical materials unnecessarily. Once they’re mixed, they become unrecyclable and end up in landfill or incinerators regardless of intent.
Modular frames, not fixed assemblies. Components removed, refinished and reinstalled without demolishing adjacent elements. The frame lasts the life of the building. The surface changes.
Lesson one: services already think this way, interiors do not
One of the clearest themes to emerge was that MEP engineering, as a discipline, is in many respects already ahead of the curve on lifecycle thinking. Good engineering practice has always designed for isolation, replacement and spare capacity. Plant is sized so it can be maintained, extended or swapped out. Ductwork, pipework and cable trays are specified with room to grow. Replacement cycles are anticipated, not avoided.
Interiors, by contrast, are too often designed as if nothing will ever need to come out. Adhesives, bonded composites, glued joinery, integrated fittings that cannot be separated from the surfaces they sit in. The result is that when change comes, and it always does, the only option is demolition.
The lesson is straightforward. The discipline that has lived with maintenance and replacement as everyday realities has developed a different design instinct. Interior design needs to borrow that instinct. Specify fixings that can be undone. Treat components as serviceable. Assume change will happen, because it will.
Lesson two: the real barriers are records, access and closed systems
Across both services and interiors, the same three barriers came up again and again.
- Lack of up to date record information. Without records, the next team cannot maintain, repair or reuse anything with confidence. BIM models, material passports and properly kept O&M manuals should outlive the project team. Too often they don’t.
- Concealed installations that cannot be accessed without destroying the surrounding work. If a component has to be smashed out to get to it, it will be replaced, not refurbished.
- Closed proprietary systems that cannot be modified, extended or repaired by anyone other than the original supplier. Some refrigeration systems sit in this category. So do some interior product systems. The lock-in is rarely worth the convenience.
None of these barriers are unsolvable. They are design and procurement decisions, made early, that determine whether the asset is reusable in fifteen years or destined for the skip.
Lesson three: the commercial argument is already proven
One of the most useful things that came out of the conversation was confirmation, from multiple project sources, that embedding circular economy and D4D principles does not have to cost more than a conventional fit out. Design time often increases. Build cost, build time and operational performance do not need to suffer. On well-run projects they improve.
The reasons are practical. When the team is aligned early, decisions are made once rather than three times. When suppliers and contractors are brought into the conversation properly, they tend to come up with their own solutions for reducing waste, and those solutions are often better than anything the designers could have specified. On one recent project we heard about, offcuts from a single material were used by the contractor to build a piece of furniture that ended up in the finished scheme. That kind of thing only happens when the conversation about circularity has been had openly, with everyone in the room.
It is also worth saying that the assumption that D4D means a compromised aesthetic is simply wrong. Modern minimalist finishes, precision joinery, luxury retail interiors. All of these are entirely achievable with mechanical fixings and demountable details. The visible difference, at handover, is often zero. The difference shows up at year seven, when the asset can be refreshed instead of replaced.
Lesson four: warranties are a manageable risk, not a reason to avoid reuse
One question that recurs in any serious discussion of reuse is the warranty problem. Reusing plant or components carries some risk of failure or fault, and some of that risk falls outside the standard supplier or installer defects period. For some clients, this is enough to stop the conversation.
The answer is not to avoid reuse. The answer is to plan for it. Develop maintenance practices and budgets that anticipate the risk. Build long-term relationships with preferred suppliers and contractors who understand how to dismantle, repair and reassemble equipment properly. Treat the maintenance team as a strategic partner, not a cost line. The risk is real but it is manageable, and the financial and carbon savings from extended life vastly outweigh it.
Lesson five: buildings are service platforms, not fixed assets
Perhaps the single biggest shift in thinking the panel pointed towards is this: stop treating buildings as fixed objects and start treating them as long-term service platforms. The fabric, the services and the fit out have different lives. They should be designed to be independent of each other, so that any one of them can change without forcing the others to change with it.
In practice that means aligning fabric cycles with M&E replacement schedules. It means planning for sub-division, expansion or change of use from the outset. It means being generous, sometimes uncomfortably so, with plant and services voids, because flexibility in fifteen years is worth more than tidy plans today. It means, in some cases, taking the energy centre out of the building entirely so that the services can be upgraded without ever touching the fabric.
This is not theoretical. It is how the buildings that endure have always been designed. We have just spent the last few decades forgetting it.
Lesson six: silos are the real obstacle
The biggest single barrier to D4D is not technical, financial or aesthetic. It is organisational. Disciplines work in sequence rather than in parallel. Maintenance teams are excluded from design conversations. Suppliers are appointed too late to influence the detailing. Sustainability consultants are asked to validate decisions that have already been made.
D4D requires joined-up thinking. The architect, the services engineer, the interior designer, the contractor, the client and the client’s maintenance provider all need to be in the room when the principles are set, not afterwards. The cost of that early integration is a few extra meetings. The cost of avoiding it is paid in skips.
Lesson seven: assets that survive share three qualities
Whether you are talking about a chiller, a wardrobe or a tiled wall, the same three qualities determine whether it gets reused or thrown away.
Recorded. Someone knows what it is, where it is, how it was installed and how to take it apart. Without this, no one will risk touching it.
Robust. It was specified to outlast its first use. Cheap finishes and hybrid materials do not survive a refurbishment cycle. Solid materials, mechanical fixings and quality manufacture do.
Well maintained. Someone has cared for it across its life. Maintenance is the difference between an asset and a future skip.
If a component has all three, it stays in use. If it has none, it goes in the bin. The design decision is whether to give it the chance.
The commercial case, simply put
For a 7-year hotel cycle, D4D delivers around 53% furniture cost reduction versus full replacement, 40% overall capex reduction versus strip and replace, 75% embodied carbon reduction, and roughly 700 additional sellable nights across an 80-room property because rooms come back online faster and fewer rooms are offline during refurbishment.
These aren’t projections. They are the numbers we are seeing on our projects.
Thank you
Hosting a panel only works when the people sitting next to you have something genuine to say, and Nick and Brendan both did. I came away from Footprint+ with sharper thinking than I went in with, which is the highest compliment I can pay to a conversation. Thank you to both of them for the time and the thought they brought to it, and to the Footprint+ team for putting on an event that takes these subjects seriously.
If you want to talk to us about how D4D might work on your project, or about any of the points raised on the panel, get in touch.
