Home sweet eco-home?
Edward Hobson, Director of Partnership, Design Council
In the on-going cost of living crisis that is blighting the country, there will be another difficult choice for many people as we approach the winter. Heat or eat?
The escalating cost of the regular shopping basket and the price hikes in energy and utility bills have only added to the acute pain of eeking out the weekly budget. This has and will continue to hit those on lower incomes, those least able to exercise a choice in relation to fuel for the self, family or home.
For many this stark choice is an unsolvable dilemma, escapable only by having more income. If we were to introduce design as presenting any form of solution in this space, it could get a fairly swift rejection as being something way off target, irrelevant, a luxury. Not only by those families making those hard choices, but also by those responsible for providing the housing in which they live.
It needn’t be.
At the Design for Planet Festival curated by the Design Council, a strong theme emerged of how good design can not only meet the basics, but exceed them, ensuring that well designed housing means low cost, low carbon, beautiful homes.
One of our speakers, Kwajo Tweneboa, has been creating a storm on social media in challenging the poor state of families’ homes initially across London but resonating with people and communities across England. These are familiar instances of poor repair and maintenance affecting mid-twentieth century blocks and shockingly, examples where new builds as well are suffering rapid deterioration in their fabric. Poor air circulation, leading to damp and mould problems, and poor respiratory health. Poor thermal performance, being too hot in summer and badly insulated to be warm enough in winter, leading to high heating bills.
It needn’t be like this argued David Mikhail, architect and designer of the award-winning Goldsmith Street housing scheme in Norwich. With sufficient attention and effort they have demonstrated that by following a Passivhaus model, residents in social housing can enjoy a superior standard of living. The fundamentals of keeping a home warm in the winter becomes achievable at a low cost. The expectation to have clean, breathable air internally is met and significantly improves people’s day to day health. These are not magical results but the known, provable effects of investing in a design and aspiring to a model of quality development. The fact that the model guarantees a low carbon, sustainable home is really the best ulterior benefit.
And to realise this shift also means new commercial opportunities for businesses. Buildings can be more easily manufactured in a modular way offsite and assembled onsite.
This theme, of ensuring that problems are designed out at source, was also reflected in a second panel which related, not to housing but to the correct use of materials in common products we take for granted. Today is it inconceivable (thanks to consumer legislation) that we wouldn’t know what ingredients are in any foodstuff we buy from a shop. That’s important to make an informed choice about what we are putting into ourselves and also knowing (some, but not all) of the supply chain issues, where it’s come from and where that packaging can go once we’re done with it. However, that’s not the case for many products we chose to fill our homes with, and we’re met with a striking absence of this information.
Edward Bulmer, of Bulmer Paints, invited us to recall ever seeing an ingredients list on the side of a can of paint. Paint is almost as ubiquitous as walls, everyone has them and everyone has chosen or been in receipt of a decorative coat.
But when we strip away the colourful narrative, what’s the actual product? It’s a chemical, a carbon based polymer which carries a pigment. However as consumers, we have no information on the can about what’s in it. And this is vital because of the things which it does when it’s innocuously sitting on the wall. No insight as to its toxicity: no handle on what vapours and molecules it will release into our homes. No idea about it’s porosity or how breathable it is, allowing moisture to pass through the wall.
We’d been discussing how important Passivhaus design had been to creating the warm, comfortable home as an envelope to life by better managing heat and moisture. Here at the material scale within that envelope, we have a product which is not designed with heat or moisture management in mind. This needn’t be the case as Bulmer has redesigned his paints from source, moving away from the industry standard oil-based formulas to plant-based ones which are not only designed for planet but better designed for humans too.
He remarked that it was no coincidence that those who are least able to afford their housing, are probably the least able to afford (or have afforded to them) higher quality paints to decorate their home. This frequently results in the least well performing paints being used, those which are effectively creating a plastic cover on the walls which traps moisture in the home. It is the conditions where, without other ventilation and appropriate heat, spores and mould thrive and add to chronically poor air quality. The NHS is perennially overwhelmed but the incidences of respiratory problems, of asthma and other lung diseases are hugely increasing, particularly among children.
Simple choices. Better designed products which not only reduce the stresses and impositions on our environmental resources but also contribute a significant improvement to people’s health and wellbeing. Not an ‘either or’, but a ‘both and’.
At two scales, in wholly different ways, two businesses demonstrating that homes can be designed with better intent, to make safe, warm beautiful environments. The choice for those living there is no longer how to meet one of the basics: but moving beyond this because good design is proven being fundamental to providing the basics and the benefits beyond this for sustaining, not compromising life.
