What Is an Eco-Home? Four Principles From an Architect
We help landowners and homeowners extend their homes, build eco-homes, and create unique homestays that gain planning permission, perform well, and pay them back. RIBA Chartered Architects.
Introduction - Eco-Home/ Sustainable Home
An eco-home, or a 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 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 statmenet 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 finishes with three reasons an eco-home is worth buildin, 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 energey 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 with these homes are often ill-suited to the climates in which they're designed, and they typically have more glazing than they need. As UK summers are getting so much hotter, excess heating is becoming a big problem
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 Cario, for example: its historic courtyard houses, Bayt al-Suhaymi, are a seventeenth-century example you can still visit today; they used courtyards and shuttered windows to cool the home. The street outside could be 34 degrees while the rooms inside were roughly 18 degrees.
Principle 1: Orientation
Where a project is positioned, it’s oreintation to the south-facing light, all these considerations determine the orientation, and subsequently how much lighting enters the space.
Ideally, what you want to design for is a home that allows more natural lighting in the winter time, and less in the summer. Thereby benefiting from thermal mass/ thermal gains that come during Winter, free heating, but avoiding excess heating during summer. Much of this can be done through the likes of deciduous trees, which loose there leaves in winter, but gain them in summer, thereby blocking excess summer lighting.
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, wool, zinc 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 work in modern construction methods, as a means that is efficient in terms of construction, but also offers levels of construction efficiency. One of the great things with modern construction methods is that they offer
How can we 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.
