Inside An Architect's First Self-Designed Eco Home

people aren't going to accept low energy retrofit if it means you lose the character or the joy in your home it was the first time I've had the opportunity to design a house for myself it's an Edwardian house from about 1905. we extended at the rear we converted the Loft and then did a low energy retrofit and that involved insulating the entire house triple glazing air tightness and mvhr the back of the house is North facing so really the key was to open up the house at ground floor to bounce the natural light around a bit more what we've tried to do at the same time is not make the entire house completely open plan and we've kept some partitions with the garden rather than having a patio just outside the door because it's north facing you're never really going to sit in the shadow there so that meant we could bring the planting right up to the door in the window and have the sitting areas slightly further into the middle of the garden it's about working with the orientation and responding to what you have I like the bedroom because it's quite a minimal space with a really restricted palette of materials so it's only Douglas fair and lime plaster we wanted to create a full wall of curtains so it really feels like part of the architecture [Music] in winter temperatures are stable throughout the house there's no cold spots near windows the other thing is the mvhr it filters the the fresh air coming into the house so it removes things like Diesel particulates and nox also things like pollens if you suffer from hay fever like I do it should be a much better indoor air quality too with the both the finishes and the structure of the house we've tried to consider embodied energy as carefully as possible and to reduce that really it means using less materials that are heavily processed or are transported a long way so we've tried to use Stone and Timber wherever we can avoiding the use of concrete and steel wherever possible the key thing that I learned during the process of doing a low energy build is but it's really important to keep an eye on the air tightness I think there's lots of simple things that you can do and even if you're not doing a low energy retrofit you can quite easily have draft proof letterbox covers you can properly seal existing doors and windows you can add secondary glazing really cost effectively so there's lots of low hanging fruit it's just thinking about decisions carefully because you can do a lot that doesn't have any impact on the budget but will save a lot either in embodied energy or energy and use the modern house selling thoughtfully designed homes across the UK

Channel: The Modern House

Views: 120,062

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Id: mX0Vw9TGfL0

Length: 3min 47sec (227 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023