29 Redland Hill

Our architectural practice, archipeleco, had been designing eco-refurbishment projects for our residential clients for five years when we decided to up sticks and move from London to Bristol. One of the reasons for moving was to be able to carry out an extreme eco-refurbishment on a 1930’s house we had just bought in central Bristol and see how much we could reduce our carbon emissions and general environmental impact as a family. We had proposed some of the more substantial eco-refurbishment measures for our clients but often they did not end up being realised due to various constraints (time, money, planning restrictions) and we wanted to test out these ideas ourselves.

Our house is a larger-than-typical detached property built in 1934 and lived in for many years by an elderly couple who loved their garden but did not do much to keep their house up to standard - an ideal property for two architects to use as a laboratory for some of our more challenging ideas. We also wanted to collect as much data for the house once it had been finished to inform the eco-refurbishment debate. We were lucky enough to have the help of Dr. Paul Benson from De Montfort University (www.GreenBusinessLight.com) who helped collate the data and format it into digestible documents.