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Company Profile

Animal Welfare Design Solutions (AWS) is a specialist architecture practice working exclusively on animal welfare buildings — shelters, veterinary hospitals, and sanctuaries. Where a general architecture practice treats an animal facility as one project among many, AWS treats animal welfare as the whole discipline: every layout decision is tested against animal stress, biosecurity, and staff workflow, not just floor area and budget.

Our Experience

AWS has extensive experiance working across the animal welfare sector, delivering projects for top-tier national charities and government bodies throughout the UK. That experience covers both new-build developments and the conversion and refurbishment of existing sites — from early feasibility studies through to buildings in day-to-day use.

Working closely with large, regulated organisations has shaped how AWS approaches every project: rigorous attention to welfare standards, clear and accountable processes, and designs that hold up to the scrutiny of a charity board or a public-sector procurement process, not just a planning committee.

What This Experience Means for You

  • We've worked within the constraints you're working within. Charity capital campaigns, local authority budget cycles, and public-sector procurement processes aren't new to us — we design around them, not despite them.

  • We understand both new-build and conversion. Many of the sites we've worked on weren't blank canvases — they were existing buildings with legacy layouts, live occupancy, and real operational constraints to design around.

  • We know what "top-tier" scrutiny looks like. Designing for large, well-governed organisations means holding every decision to a standard that can be explained and defended, not just delivered.

Coordinated From the Start

AWS works closely with national kennel and cattery manufacturers and installers, bringing them into the design process early — on a new-build development or a fit-out within an existing building alike — so that the kennel system coordinates with the building's layout, drainage, ventilation, and structure from the outset. Involving our manufacturing and installation partners from the earliest design stages, rather than after the building is fixed, means fewer compromises, fewer clashes discovered on site, and a finished facility that works as one coordinated whole rather than a building and a kennel system designed in isolation from each other.

Our Approach

At the heart of every AWS design is a simple aim: to create spaces where animals are comfortable, calm, and cared for in a clean, stress-free environment — and where the people running the facility can do so efficiently, guided by clear, process-driven ways of working rather than layouts that fight against them. Good welfare and good operations aren't separate goals for us; a building that works well for staff is, almost always, a building that works well for the animals in it too.

Let's talk about your next building.