Kevin McCloud’s Principles of Home: Making a Place to Live. Kevin McCloud

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      (Paul Miller)

      Finished houses at The Triangle, the first Hab Housing project in Swindon

      PRINCIPLE

      01

      Demand that your home consumes the minimum of energy yet keeps you warm and comfortable. Demand a healthy environment with fresh, clean air. Demand that your building does not just save energy but produces it. Demand that your home has a minimal environmental footprint and uses our precious resources wisely and sparingly.

      (Adam Mork/architect, Hein-Troy Architekten/Arcaid)

      Sunlight House, Pressbaum, near Vienna – the first carbon-neutral one-family house in Austria

      I hope my book will help you value the material world in a different, fuller way. I hope that as you read it, you’ll begin to wonder how much energy it took to make it; how much time, effort and care were spent by the dozens of people who were involved with it. And I hope that, as well as awakening your curiosity, it will give you the tools for minimizing our detrimental impact on the environment and on other human beings: the tools of wasting less (or wasting nothing), saving fuel energy, exploiting what we have to hand, respecting craftsmanship, reusing the resources and made things that we already have, and sharing them more.

      Threading throughout the entire book are the 43 Principles of Home, memorable ideas which I’ve collected or formulated over the past 30 years, drawing inspiration from the best of Le Corbusier, Vitruvius, William Morris and Homer Simpson.

      TEST ONE: WHICH IS THE MOST ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY HOUSE?

       A. 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.

       B. 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.

       C. 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.

       Answer

      TEST TWO: WHICH IS THE MOST ECO-FRIENDLY CAR IN THE LIST BELOW?

       A. A Toyota Prius

       B. A 1937 Alfa Romeo tourer

       C. A Ferrari

       D. A 37-year-old Bond 875 (my first car)

       E. The Innocent Smoothie van

       F. An Aston Martin DB9

       G. A Range Rover

      You might plump for the Prius as the angel of the pack and the Range Rover as the devil. Let me ask you another question: if you had the money, would you commission a small firm of English cabinet-makers to make you a bespoke, crafted piece of furniture? Or buy a cheap copy from the Far East? Well, the more ethical solution has to be the former: it’s a local transaction, it involves much less shipping, it creates relationships between the makers and the owner. The automotive equivalent is buying an Aston Martin over a Toyota Prius.

      Surely this is rubbish. The Prius emits 145 grams of carbon per kilometre while the Aston emits nearly 500. But even these figures are meaningless. Who is the biggest environmental sinner? The man who drives his Prius 20 miles to and from work each day? Or the man who travels 50 miles on the train? Or the man who owns an Aston Martin and walks across his yard to his office and drives his car at weekends only? It’s probably the Prius driver.

       Answer