It’s been an eventful couple of months at A’Bear & Ball Architects LLP! At the beginning of April, we celebrated our office anniversary, and later that month our team visited a contemporary glazing manufacturer.

And then in May, our employee Duncan passed his Part 3 Examination, so it’s been a pretty exciting few months at the Practice!

Celebrating our office anniversary

A year ago in April, we moved to our new offices in Southmoor, just outside Abingdon… and we love it! The building is a converted stables and is proving to be a highly energy efficient and comfortable environment in which to work.

When looking to relocate offices in April 2022 to suit our expanding team, the energy performance and location of the building was an important consideration for our business as we continue to actively look at ways our office can reduce its carbon footprint.

Our building is a great example of re-purposing an existing redundant structure (former stables) by conversion to a new viable, commercial use and minimising embodied carbon.

The thick stone outer walls combined with modern internal insulation linings provide a structure that’s energy efficient to heat and comfortable to occupy all year round – avoiding excessive heating demand in winter and keeping cool in the summer (even in last summer's 40 degree heat!).

We were attracted to it, as a tenant, by its reduced energy consumption/carbon emissions with one of its key features being its heating served by a site wide biomass boiler.

We’ve very much enjoyed fitting out the building in our style, and it’s proving a great location for our growing team as we also celebrated our Architectural Technologist Katie and Office Manager Taryn being a part of the Practice for a year!

If you haven’t seen our office yet, come say hello! We always have great coffee and biscuits on hand…

Visiting a contemporary glazing manufacturer

Our team got to visit the floating glass meeting room at IQ Glass’s showroom in Amersham, Buckinghamshire!

We are thankful for IQ Glass for having us. We really enjoyed learning more about what they do and offer as a contemporary glazing manufacturer.

Our Practice has more exciting CPD opportunities planned in the coming months!

Duncan passing his Part 3 Examination

In May, we were really excited to announce that our employee Duncan passed the Part 3 Examination in Practice and Management Course with commendation at Oxford Brookes University's School of Architecture!

Since joining A’Bear & Ball Architects as an Architectural Assistant in 2020, he has helped develop a number of exciting contemporary and sustainable residential schemes for private clients, as well as larger education projects.

Duncan was then able to commence the registration process for becoming a fully qualified architect with RIBA and ARB!

Check out our online portfolio to see what projects we’ve been working on. And please get in touch if you’d like to discuss how we could work together!