GBRC

If refurbishing a home wasn't complicated enough, we now have to choose our materials with greater care and attention. You could see this as a limitation, but for me it’s an opportunity to create a style that embodies the philosophies of sustainability.
  Luckily, there are ever more interesting materials to choose from as I found out when designing the Eco home exhibition at the Geffrye Museum in East London. It struck me that when designing eco homes there are masculine and feminine sides to consider.

The “masculine” focuses on the technical aspects involved in making it more efficient and practical things like new boilers, water efficient toilets and A-rated appliances.
By contrast there is a “feminine” element involved in creating a beautiful and nurturing home. Think fabrics, furniture and dressings.

How do you start an eco refurb? As you mean to continue of course: with lofty environmental intentions.

In my case that means stripping out my home’s old fixtures and putting in steel joists and columns to improve its efficiency and circulation, and future proof it (more on that later).

To significantly improve the energy efficiency of the vast majority of our existing homes, that’s to say,  to go beyond the low hanging fruit of loft and cavity wall insulation, is fraught with hassle, expensive, and let’s face it, not the most compelling of topics for conversation with our friends. But, it could be the most important thing we could do to tackle climate change, and at the same time, one of the smartest investments we could make in our homes.

So we have to turn things around. We have to make energy efficient refurb easy, affordable and yes, even aspirational! And that’s where Kevin McCloud and the Grand Designs Great British Refurb Campaign come in. Because if anyone can make solid wall insulation sexy, Kevin McCloud, the heart-throb tsar of the designer home, surely can.