We help landowners and homeowners build eco-homes, extend their homes, and create unique holiday homes that gain planning permission and pay them back. RIBA Chartered Architects.
Introduction: Eco-Homes and Sustainable Homes
An eco-home, or sustainable home, is a home that’s designed to work with its surrounding climate.
In general, an eco-home’s design is determined by its orientation in relation to the sun, its size relative to what the owners need, and the materials used.
The term eco-home, however, is not a protected term. There is no legal standard behind it, and anyone can attach the label to anything. In many ways an “eco-home” is a statement of intent.
Over the years, though, we have established principles worth associating with it and they should shape how you design and subsequently live in one.
For me, an eco-home comes down to Four Principles: orientation, project size, use of materials, and method of construction.
In this article, we will work through each, and finish with three reasons an eco-home is worth building, including a planning advantage most self-builders don't know about. If you prefer, I have also recorded a video you can watch that explains these principles.
FYI: I have written a free guide on little-known energy-efficient systems for your home. You can access it using the link below:
Where most modern homes go wrong
Before the principles, it helps to see what an eco-home is not. Many architect-designed homes have high levels of glazing. It's part of the contemporary modernist style we see everywhere, from self-build magazines to cities like Dubai.
The issue is that these homes are often ill-suited to the climates in which they're designed, and they typically have more glazing than they need.
That's becoming a real problem now that our summers are getting hotter. It's not uncommon to walk into one of these houses in July and find it uncomfortably warm, warm enough that you don't want to be in the room. I've written separately about why eco-homes overheat and how to prevent it at the design stage.
Unfortunately, this is a choice being made - but it does not have to be this way. Take Cairo, for example: Bayt al-Suhaymi, a seventeenth-century courtyard house you can still visit today, used its courtyard and shuttered windows to cool the rooms. The street outside could be 34 degrees while the rooms inside were roughly 18 degrees.
Principle 1: Orientation
Where a project sits on the site, and how it faces the southern light, determines how much daylight enters the space.
Ideally, what you want to design for is a home that allows more natural light in winter and less in summer. That way you get free solar heating in winter but avoid overheating in summer. Much of this can be done through the likes of deciduous trees, which lose their leaves in winter, but gain them in summer, blocking excess summer sun.
Generally speaking, getting the orientation of the project right costs quite little; however, getting it wrong can be an expensive mistake to make.
Principle 2: Project size
The most sustainable square metre is the one you don't build. Every extra metre costs you twice: once to build it, then every year to heat it. A smaller home designed well outperforms a big home designed loosely, in comfort and in running cost.
All too often, projects are not carefully considered against the space that is actually needed: excess bedrooms, excess space. I’m not sure about you, but spaces that are bigger than they need to be make me uncomfortable.
Principle 3: Use of materials
I work mostly in timber: frames and laminated structure, natural insulation like cork and wool, zinc roofs, and cladding like cedar that weathers rather than deteriorates. Two questions decide a material for me. What did it cost the planet to make? Steel and concrete are energy-hungry to produce; timber stores carbon. And how will it behave over fifty years? Natural, breathable build-ups manage moisture instead of trapping it, which is where a lot of modern construction quietly fails.
One of my favourite things about the use of natural materials is that they age gracefully with a space, whereas synthetic materials do the opposite and look awful after a few years.
Compare that with the synthetic materials common in volume housebuilding. Many off-gas, releasing chemicals into the air of your home for months or years after installation. And most age badly — they look cheap because they are, and after a few winters they show it.
Principle 4: Method of construction
How a project is constructed is also critical. We typically use modern methods of construction because they are efficient to build. One of the great things with modern construction methods is that they offer precision and speed on site without giving up craft, which is exactly what an eco-home needs.
How we can help
As RIBA Chartered Architects based in Birmingham, we specialise in eco-homes and sustainable homes, including projects in the Green Belt.
If you have a project in mind and you would like to have a conversation about it, you can book a call directly with me by booking a 20-minute call in the top right-hand corner.
