Featured in Property Week: Building a healthier future for UK housing

Is the housing crisis also a health crisis?

The NHS is under strain. The housing market is under strain. These are usually discussed as separate problems.

In our view, they are not.

According to the Building Research Establishment, poor-quality housing costs the NHS an estimated £1.4 billion each year through cold, damp and unsafe homes. That figure reflects preventable strain embedded in the fabric of our housing stock.

Why health-first housing matters

For much of the twentieth century, housing policy sat within the Ministry of Health. The separation of shelter and health is relatively recent, and the consequences are increasingly visible. The question is not whether housing influences health. It clearly does. The question is whether we are prepared to design and value homes accordingly, recognising their role in preventative healthcare and long-term resident satisfaction.

Our co-founder and CEO, Alex Uregian, recently contributed to a Property Week article exploring this shift toward healthier homes.

Alex commented:

“We have shown that homes can be designed to improve health and wellbeing, even in complex retrofits, achieving strong results through disciplined delivery and creating spaces where people genuinely want to live.”

Shining a spotlight on Albion Court, Whitechapel

“Sustainable housing” is often framed through carbon metrics and regulatory thresholds. While necessary, they do not capture lived experience. 

Residents experience buildings through sleep quality, air quality, noise, thermal comfort and psychological ease. If sustainability measures are to resonate with residents and contribute to preventative healthcare, those outcomes must move to the centre of design decisions.

At City Sanctuary, we tested that proposition at Albion Court, a former 1903 brewery in Whitechapel, repositioned as the UK’s first residential retrofit targeting WELL for Residential certification.

The brief was deliberate: could a complex heritage building be upgraded to enhance environmental quality and resident experience, without drifting into the luxury niche?

The approach focused on three areas.

Sleep quality

Bespoke lighting systems calibrated to support circadian rhythm. Automated blackout blinds. High-performance breathable mattresses and materials designed to improve recovery and daytime alertness within an urban setting. 

Environmental control

Air filtration triggered by live air quality monitoring. Water filtration at source. Enhanced thermal performance with easy to use zonal control to maintain maximum comfort control and reduce airborne and waterborne irritants.. The objective was to reduce environmental (airborne and water) irritants and temperature volatility.

Psychological comfort

Retention of original architectural features, low-VOC finishes and furniture, access to movement via the listed staircase and dedicated storage in the basement to reduce visual clutter. Design decisions were made with cognitive load and sensory stress in mind.

The business case for healthy homes

Design ambition must be matched by financial discipline.

• Approximately 20 percent rental premium relative to control unit.
• Rental voids of less than five days
• Build costs approximately 10 percent higher than a standard retrofit

When rental uplift exceeds capex uplift and void risk reduces, enhanced specification becomes an investment variable rather than a discretionary upgrade.

For developers, operating within tight capital constraints and a generationally difficult market,  that distinction matters.

Scaling the Blueprint

The industry conversation is evolving. Developers and policymakers increasingly recognise that building quality carries long-term fiscal and social consequences.

Yet valuation frameworks rarely account for health resilience. Planning systems remain more comfortable measuring carbon than lived experience. Lending models often treat enhanced residential performance as optional.

Projects such as Albion Court offer early evidence that health-led design can align resident outcomes with commercial performance. When a 10 percent uplift in build cost delivers a 20 percent rental premium and reduced voids, environmental quality becomes investment logic.

As Winston Churchill observed, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”

If that is true, then housing policy, valuation models and development decisions are not neutral. They influence health, productivity and public cost for decades.

The next step is clear: integrate health metrics into valuation, planning and lending frameworks, and test the results at a meaningful scale.

The next step is clear: integrate health metrics into valuation, planning and lending frameworks. The evidence is emerging. The market will adapt. The only question is who moves first.

Want to learn more?

Read the full Property Week article here 

Explore how we integrated WELL standards into a 120-year-old building. View the Albion Court Case Study