Oldwood House is a lovingly renovated 1960s six bedroom family home. Owned by our design-led clients for more than 15 years, Oldwood House was not in need of renovation - it was already beautiful. What it needed was retrofit.

For all its charm, Oldwood House was cold. Like many existing buildings more than 15 years old, it had not been built with energy efficiency in mind. The building has 240 square meters of floor space to heat and when we started the project had no wall insulation at all. Our clients wanted firstly to understand what they should do. They wanted their home to be warmer and more energy efficient, but where should they start?

We began our work on this project by completing a detailed energy use analysis. This could then be used to inform our decisions on what the priorities should be. The analysis revealed that solid wall insulation would add the most benefit, and that replacing the windows wouldn’t add a huge amount of additional performance benefit. On a building of this size, not replacing the windows saved our clients a huge sum of money and disruption.

External wall insulation was identified as the best route forwards for this project. We first filled the cavity walls and then used woodfibre board to wrap the building in an insulating layer, finishing with a lime based render and colour matching the finish to recreate the original aesthetic of the building. Particular care was taken not to damage or disrupt the many design features and flourishes around the building, including a large attached covered patio area, wooden framing and several planting supports.

Since completing the wall insulation we are now working with our client to strip and restore the existing windows to preserve instead of replace them.