Kevin McCloud’s 43 Principles of Home: Enjoying Life in the 21st Century

So here’s another little test.

Q: Which do you think is the most environmentally friendly house?

1. A 500-year-old farmhouse, built from local materials—any stones that were just turned up out of the field—and oak trees from the farm in which it sits, with stone floors laid on the earth and thick walls with a high thermal mass. Albeit the place is listed and hasn’t got double glazing.

2. A house built by Ben Law in the forest in Sussex, entirely from the forest in Sussex. Ben cut 10,000 shingles from his own coppiced chestnut trees. The frame is coppiced chestnut and the oak cladding, straw-bale insulation and ash window frames are all from his woods and cut and assembled by him. This place does have double glazing, and it’s off grid, has its own water supply and is heated by Ben’s own wood thinnings from his sustainable forestry business, making charcoal and hurdles.

3. A three-bedroom family home in Scotland. It has super-insulated walls, it’s airtight, it has a state-of-the-art Panelvent timber panel construction sitting on a concrete plinth for high thermal mass, it’s triple-glazed and it comes with a heat recovery system.

So which is greenier than green? Well, it has to be Ben’s, of course. Maybe followed by the Scottish timber box. With the farmhouse a poor third, maybe. Which, it turns out, has no oil-fired range, has 10 inches of loft insulation and is heated with a biomass boiler.

Again, it’s down to use. You can construct a super-insulated, resource-meagre dwelling, turn the heating up and then open all the windows. Or live in a freezing mansion with no heating and one bath a week. There is no such thing as an eco-home, just as there’s no such thing as an eco-car. It’s our use of these things that determines not how environmentally friendly they are but how environmentally friendly we are.

1 Peter Marcuse, Environment and Urbanization, vol. 10, no. 2, October 1998

2 Our Common Future, OUP, 1987

3 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, HM Treasury, 2006

4 www.bioregional.com/our-vision/one-planet-living/

5 Paul King and Pooran Desai, The Little Book of One Planet Living, Alastair Sawday, 2006

Part 1 Energy

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