Last night I attended Kelling Designs' inaugural sustainability evening at their flamboyant shop in Langton Street, London. It was a cosy, lively affair with their founder Emma Deterding probing three panel guests on their thoughts on how to embed sustainability in the building and interior design world. The three guests were: Edward Bulmer: natural paint [...]
Change occurs by the actions we take and the choices we make and nowhere is this more apparent than in what we do with our homes. It's taken a while, but we've finally woken up to the fact that sustainability is the future of building and product design. Incorporating it into the most frequently remodeled [...]
Capturing individual style in rooms is key to creating happy spaces that we love being in. But I think that making sure rooms reflect our values is equally important. Most people today care about the environment and their impact on it. When we're renovating houses, we have to consider the environmental impact of the choices [...]
I'm not joking when I tell you that the hardest part of this renovation project has been deciding what paint to use on our woodwork. We've got a lot of wood, both in the old part of the house and in the new extension: Bathroom cabinets, which I know I shouldn't paint because they're oak, [...]
I've had a week to source tiles for three bathrooms, a downstairs loo and a laundry room. There are hundreds of beautiful tiles out there but very few of them can be classed as eco-friendly. I got excited when I stumbled on Eco Friendly Tiles who supply tiles containing recycled content with carbon neutral assurances, [...]
One of the first blog posts I wrote was on eco paints (see Eco paints demystified). Now that I'm at the stage of specifying paints for our renovation project and am facing painful budget constraints, the price difference between environmentally-friendly paints and high street brands is really hitting home! So I thought I'd look again [...]
In most family homes the kitchen is the go-to hub, a bustling, high traffic area which needs to function efficiently and reflect the style and character of its occupants. Kitchens are often the first space that people look to renovate and here I give you my top 5 eco tips on how to make your kitchen [...]
They say that when you decorate a room you decide on the floor and work your way up. They also say make a decision and stick to it. Unfortunately I've heeded neither bits of advice - I've changed my mind countless times over the kitchen floor and now it's crunch time. The easiest thing would [...]
This is a quick post to show you how beautiful, chic things can be made from other people's junk. My wonderful carpenter Willie collects scaffold planks from construction firms who, for health and safety reasons, throw them out after a certain time. They are wonderfully solid and weathered to perfection. Willie uses them, in the same [...]
I've been building up to writing this post for a long time, mainly because there is so much baffling information out there on eco paints, with many manufacturers using terms that are designed to mislead. In 2010 an EU directive came into force which heavily restricted the solvent (or VOC) content in paints. This heralded [...]
On this bleak day in November when the next president of the United States is someone who has brandished climate change as a "bullshit hoax" and pledged to "cancel all climate change spending," I'm questioning my efforts to cut carbon emissions and renovate green. But, discarding my eco principles would mess with my head even [...]
I'm very happy because I've met Willie - a carpenter who doesn't look at me as if I'm crazy when I tell him I want to use certified British wood to build cupboards for my son's room. In fact, he even tells me he can build them using reclaimed wood from scaffold planks. But the greatest [...]
