About Us
We help you create healthy homes and workspaces, while treading lightly on the planet within your budget.
Florence Collier
Founder and owner
A chartered Mechanical Engineer and Passivhaus Designer and Expert modeler, with more than 25 years’ expertise in the built environment and in sustainability.
Closing the Performance Gap
I am deeply passionate about closing the “performance gap”, the difference between the actual performance of a building in operation compared with the designer’s intended modus operandi, as has been highlighted through Post Occupancy Evaluations on many of our past projects.
This is why I am also a certified Passivhaus designer, the only comfort and energy standard with a proven track record of reducing energy consumption in buildings by 70-90%. I am also keen to implement circular economy principles and generally to make construction a more pleasant environment to work in.
Becoming humblebee
This particular worker bee left a large company environment because she wanted to have a more immediate an impact on the quality of home and workspace building locally.
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Florence set up humblebee in order to be truly agile, to balance work and home life more effectively, and to work with a more diverse group of people, through connecting with other SMEs and community groups.
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Having a supportive network of likeminded connections has enabled us to grow our expertise and our ability to work at all project scales. We've essentially found our swarm among members of the Association for Environment Conscious Building (AECB), the Alliance for Sustainable Building Products (ASBP), the Passivhaus Trust and wider network, and the Carbon Coop in Manchester.
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A large part of our work is carrying out Retrofit Assessments both privately using PHPP (Passivhaus Planning Package, modelling software), as a collaborating modeler for Transition by Design, as well as with the People Powered Retrofit initiative, using their industry-recognized tool, the Home Retrofit Planner.
Florence is trustee and an active member of her local Transition Town volunteer group and a STEM ambassador, believing in educating those she comes into contact with across all generations, and spreading knowledge under Creative Commons principles.
The Positive+ Collective
We’re excited to present The Positive+ Collective – a collaboration between changebuilding, humblebee and Perpendicular Architecture.
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Our mission does not look to minimise our impact but to maximise our positive contribution, to benefit society and the environment.
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The Positive Collective adopts regenerative design solutions in response to the increasingly urgent issue of climate change, biodiversity loss and the social challenges we face. We were finalists in the UK's Home of 2030 competition in 2021 and have posted numerous thought pieces since.