Habitat
The natural home or environment of an animal, plant or other organism, a person’s normal environment.
Your habitat maybe the environment you are accustomed to living in but the origins of habitat may not be what you would expect. The word goes back to the Latin ‘habitare’ meaning, “to live or dwell,” which itself goes back to habere meaning “to have or own.” It seems logical that if you own a place, it is your home.
At Studio HIVE, we think that we combine location, ecology, knowledge, contemporary design, and quality to enable us to give your family or business a habitat to thrive. Location is a key factor in any property decision, but you cannot create a great place by placing a beautiful building in isolation. The space around the building is as important as the building itself.
Enhancing and linking with the landscape, be it urban or in the countryside is vital. In creating new places, we create this linkage with the habitat, we create your new habitat, your environment:
Placemaking, in short, is the building or the strengthening of physical community to create great human habitats.
The Studio HIVE team are fortunate to be based in Clifton, Bristol, one of the most desirable habitats in the country. We thrive in this ‘locale’ and we understand the quality of it, aiming to bring these qualities to every development we invest in.
Innovation
The ability to adapt, or be adapted, to many different functions or activities.
Innovation is the crucial element of everything we do. Be that creating a new product, with a new technology or a new method, or finding that solution to a difficult site or complex heritage asset. Without this approach we would stand still, there would be no progress. Innovation drives us forward.
Over the last 30-40 years many developers have not been innovative, they have not embraced the changing environment, planning system or occupier trends and as a result they no longer exist. We have pushed the envelope to explore the potential in the most difficult of development sites and have looked to use the changing planning and sustainably agenda as a platform for our approach to innovation, allowing us to maximise the opportunity before us.
Our dynamic team look at things differently; from our approach to securing the land initially, through the way we plan design, innovate, and finally put the buildings together, we challenge the design and market norms to ensure we deliver the right solution for each opportunity.
The design approach we take represents our deep ambition to find value while making use of the raw material we have. Be that a confined development site or an under-utilised building, which is considered redundant by others.
We aim to break the mould in the spaces and buildings we create, upholding our core design principles. This is not vanilla housing or boring office spaces; this is space that drives value and inspires people.
Versatility
The action or process of innovating: innovation is crucial to the continuing success of any organisation, a new method, idea, or product.
Our approach to development is to explore each opportunity to the maximum. One size does not fit all. We will not roll out a standard product; there are plenty of others doing that in a crowded and mediocre development market.
In an ever-changing market we adapt our approach. We recently purchased a site with an ambition to deliver a housing scheme; but due to the market and planning constraints we moved to a student scheme, working with Atlas Land to drive a more viable solution; adapting our offering enhanced
our returns. We aim to be adaptable on all our developments; our
ambition is not to follow a single-use class, but to deliver the right solution to each site we apply ourselves too. We will explore all investment asset classes: mixed tenure and mixed-use.
We have been doing this for many years and our developments have stood the test of time and outperformed others. The flexibility of the spaces has allowed them to adapt to the changing market and maximise the long-term value for the landowners and occupiers alike.
Environment
The surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives, the natural world – the impact on the environment by human activity.
We know that in order for development to be sustainable, we must address all three pillars of sustainability: social, economic and environmental.
Our aim is to create well-designed, beautiful homes work spaces and communities; allowing people to live happy, healthy, and environmentally positive lifestyles. We do not believe in having a standalone sustainability strategy. Instead, we integrate our vision of generating long-term value and creating successful sustainable places where people aspire to live.
We specialise in developing individually designed, high-quality buildings with low environmental impact.
We think that you can live sustainably without compromising on lifestyle. Our schemes are developed around the things we know people look for in a great place to live and work; high quality buildings and public realm, transport links; and access to jobs and amenities. To us, the development should not just be energy efficient, but must engage the community in order to deliver buildings. Good engagement reduces conflict and, most importantly, allows communities to have an influence over the future shape of where they live.
Engagement is key to gaining support, to drive innovative and pragmatic solutions for not only homes, but also new communities and new developments, which can sustain the environment.