Above: with Rachel Hodgdon (centre) and Olga Turner Baker at HSBC, Canary Wharf.
On 14 October I sat down with Rachel Hodgdon for the WELL Executive fireside chat at the WELL 2026 London Summit. Rachel is President and CEO of the International WELL Building Institute. Candi Hampton of Shaw Industries was on stage with us, and Olga Turner Baker, our technical lead at MAVI, was there with me.
If you haven't come across WELL, it's the standard IWBI wrote for how a building affects the people inside it. It launched in 2014, and today more than 100,000 commercial and residential locations in 130 countries take part. It turned air, water, light, sound and comfort into things a building can be measured against. To sit with the people who wrote it, as the founder of a company that reads homes, meant a great deal to me.
One message
I had one message for the room.
Buildings shape biology. The people inside them are the point.
We measure everything about the body and almost nothing about the building it lives in. 90% of your life happens inside a building. It should have a number attached to it.
From my Instagram stories
Five stories from the summit
Open a story to watch it. Pause whenever you like.
-
Before the summit
-
Before the summit
-
On stage
-
In the room
-
Behind the scenes
Two lists, the same words
WELL organises health in a building into ten concepts. At MAVI we read a home across ten pillars. Put the two lists side by side and six of the words are the same.
| In WELL | At MAVI |
|---|---|
| Air | Air & Ventilation |
| Water | Water & Purity |
| Light | Light & Circadian Health |
| Thermal Comfort | Thermal & Humidity Balance |
| Sound | Sound & Acoustics |
| Materials | Materials & Finishes |
Only in WELL
- Nourishment
- Movement
- Mind
- Community
Only at MAVI
- EMF & Electrical Health
- Nature & Wellbeing
- Tech & Health
- Safety & Resilience
Both lists follow the same evidence. What's different is where the work has been done. Much of it has happened in workplaces, where a company can pay for the measuring and see the return in its people. The home has mostly been left to taste and instinct.
The building that matters most
Before the summit: dinner inside a vertical farm. You can feel what a living room (literally) does to you. This is what I mean when I say spaces change how you feel.
The room you sleep in is the part nobody measures, and you spend a third of your life in it. That's why one session later in the day mattered to me as much as ours did. The summit gave a whole panel to homes: Purpose-Built Living, WELL for residential. The people who built the standard for offices are turning to the place we live.
That's the work MAVI exists for: a reading of the whole home, pillar by pillar, and the order to fix it in.
The people in the room
Rachel Hodgdon
President and CEO, IWBI
She leads the International WELL Building Institute, the public benefit corporation behind the WELL Building Standard, and she moderated our conversation.
Candi Hampton
Shaw Industries
Vice President of Global Sustainability at Shaw Industries, and the third voice in our fireside chat.
Olga Turner Baker
Ekkist and MAVI
A chartered surveyor and one of the first consultants in the UK to gain WELL Faculty status. She has been working with WELL since 2016 and leads the technical side of MAVI.
On the programme
Organisations with speakers at the summit, from the published agenda.
Behind the scenes
I love the behind-the-scenes. My obsession with mechanical rooms comes from exactly the same place: the part nobody sees is the part that makes it all work.
What this means for your home
WELL proved that a building can be measured for health. The home is the building that matters most, and it's still the one we measure least. Closing that gap is longevity architecture, and it's the whole of MAVI's work.
If you want to see where your own home stands, start with a free Snapshot. It reads the environment around your address in a few minutes.
Thank you to Rachel and the IWBI team for having me, and to HSBC for hosting us.
Session details and speakers from the WELL 2026 London Summit agenda. WELL figures from IWBI, October 2026. The 90% figure is the US EPA estimate of time spent indoors. Photos and stories by Kas Bordier. Generate a free Snapshot of your home.