Last Winter we completed deep retrofit and partial re-model of a detached house originally built in 1930s. By far the most difficult of our tasks was to improve the performance of the spread-out volume the house morphed into by 2020s.
The haphazardly-growth of the nineties, most of which was south-facing almost doubled the square footage of the original house. It also vastly increased the size of its envelope, introducing large areas of glazing within. The combined effect of it all exposed the house to the ever-worsening impacts of climate change and energy demands.
Rather than demolishing the incoherent volumes we worked with them focusing on sustainable solutions. We reduced the areas of glazing, introduced external shading, insulated the building envelope and made it air-tight. These drastically reduced its energy demands. We further helped by adding energy-generation-on-site with south and west facing solar panels and batteries to store the surplus of generated electricity.
