Secured by Design has been a fixture of new build specification for years — most house builders and their design teams know the standard well. What’s changed more recently is the addition of smart monitoring on top of that physical security baseline, and Kubu is the product most commonly specified for it. Here’s how the two actually relate to each other, and where the line sits between them.
Secured by Design: The Physical Security Baseline
Secured by Design is the UK police-backed initiative that sets security standards for doors, windows and their locking hardware, tested against PAS24. It’s a physical, tested standard — anti-lift, anti-drill and anti-pick mechanisms, multi-point locking, and frame/glazing specifications that resist forced entry. Every window and door range we supply is Secured by Design accredited and PAS24 compliant as standard, across both our window and door collections.
This is compliance you specify once, at the product level, and it’s built in — not something that depends on whether a resident remembers to lock up correctly every night.
What Kubu Adds on Top
Kubu is a retrofit-compatible smart sensor system that monitors whether a window or door is open, closed, or locked, sending real-time alerts to a smartphone app. It’s designed to work with existing window and door hardware, so it doesn’t require rewiring the plot or a different specification at the manufacturing stage.
The distinction that matters here: Kubu doesn’t replace Secured by Design’s physical security features — it adds visibility on top of them. A Secured by Design window is physically resistant to forced entry regardless of whether it’s monitored. Kubu’s contribution is catching the more common, lower-drama failure mode: a window left unlocked, or a door left ajar, that nobody realised.
Why This Combination Matters for Commercial Schemes
For house builders, this is a genuine, low-cost smart-home feature to market to buyers — something tangible beyond “the windows are secure,” which is hard to differentiate from a competitor’s equally-compliant product. Kubu compatibility comes as standard across our window range, at no additional specification cost.
For housing associations and social housing providers managing units at scale, the case is different but arguably stronger: an alert that a window’s been left open overnight isn’t just a security consideration, it’s a heat-loss and running-cost issue across dozens or hundreds of units. Catching that pattern before it becomes a recurring energy bill complaint is a genuinely useful management tool, not just a marketing feature.
What to Confirm Before Specifying
Kubu’s own hub requirements, app functionality and exact monitoring scope are worth confirming directly with a Kubu account contact for your specific scheme — particularly on larger social housing programmes where connectivity infrastructure (Wi-Fi coverage, hub placement) needs planning alongside the window specification itself, not as an afterthought post-handover.
See our dedicated Kubu page for which of our window ranges carry compatibility as standard, or our full Accreditationsfor how this sits alongside our wider compliance framework.
Talk to Our Commercial Team
If you’re specifying a scheme where smart security monitoring is a requirement — or a feature you want to offer buyers — get in touch and our Commercial team can talk through how Kubu compatibility fits your window specification.
