Planet friendly architecture, guidance and inspiration
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Taking the fuss out of architecture and building projects

2025: A year of highs, lows + hidden gains

It is already the middle of January 2026, and a slightly belated Happy New Year to you. While I used to focus solely on the future at this time of year, I’ve found it valuable to reflect on the year just passed and some of the great things that happened.😊

Last year was a blend of stunning scenery + significant project milestones

Snowboarding and site visits: I enjoyed a great family holiday in Switzerland [think my bank balance has just about recovered] and a "working" trip to Austria, where I assessed a couple of ski chalets for potential retrofit work. You can find out more about this trip on the YouTube video below [there is another associated YouTube video as well if you’re really keen]. 🏂

Professional recognition: I was pleased to help judge the Federation of Master Builders competition in Newcastle, and one of my projects reached the 2025 finals of the AT Awards for excellence in Architectural Technology.

Project progress: We made great strides on a low-carbon timber frame project in Sheffield, alongside unique challenges like an underground lithium battery bunker project.

Business realities: 2025 was a slower year for me, perhaps due to the tough economic climate and high material costs, but things are luckily picking up again.

Looking ahead to 2026

This year, I will be trying to focus on Life Cycle Analysis [LCA]. Rather than just looking at CO2 used during construction, I want to assess a project’s full carbon impact from raw materials to demolition and reuse.

Another idea I’ve had is to have a clearer and more transparent way of potential clients seeing how much it costs to employ me, before they even have an ​Initial Design Consultation​. To do this I want to integrate a fee calculator into my website so people can get a good feel for how much time it takes to do things properly and to also get a good indication of how much a good level of service costs.

So, 2025 was another busy year with lots of fun and interesting stuff done but also challenging in a few ways. Keep an eye out for updates on the plans that are afoot.

Retrofit + ventilation top tips... hang on a minute, what exactly is a retrofit?

This is a huge topic and I’ll be delving into this every few months with some various top tips. This month I’m going to be talking about ventilation and why it’s important. Before I do that, I’ll start with an introduction to Retrofit, what exactly is it and why is it important.

Retrofit is currently a bit of a buzzword in construction, but it’s more than jargon, it’s about transforming existing buildings to boost performance. This often means enhancing energy efficiency, accessibility, or functionality.

Our focus here is on energy efficiency, using a fabric-first approach. By insulating, draught-stripping, and upgrading the building’s fabric, we maximise energy savings. These improvements, known as Energy Efficiency Measures [EEMs], are tailored to enhance a building’s sustainability and comfort.

I was thinking of going for the obvious ‘silver bullet’ upgrade of insulation [it’s not the ‘silver bullet’ by the way] but I’ve decided to focus on ventilation here today.

Ventilation, which is often misunderstood, is vital for a building’s energy efficiency and health of the occupants. It involves exchanging stale indoor air with fresh outdoor air to manage moisture, remove pollutants, and enhance comfort. Poor ventilation can lead to mould, dampness, and health issues, while good ventilation ensures clean, dry air that heats faster, saving energy. Effective ventilation also boosts productivity by maintaining fresh air for work and socialising, making it a key part of any retrofit project.

Old, existing houses [and other buildings] are ventilated by the fact that they are naturally drafty buildings. This means that unintended ventilation is usually provided by lots of small holes in the floors and walls, gaps around the edges of doors and windows, and pipe and cable penetrations that aren’t sealed around the edges, etc. This also means these houses are literally sucking out heat, energy [and money] through these drafts. A benefit of a drafty building is that the drafts also provide suitable ventilation to keep the occupants healthy and the building fabric dry.

If you start upgrading [retrofitting] your building with a desire to save energy [and money!] this is a great step in the right direction. However, by doing so is likely to reduce the drafts and therefore the occupants and the building fabric will no longer be ventilated adequately. This means occupants may not be getting enough fresh air to breath, stale and contaminated air is not being removed and replaced with clean fresh air and the building fabric may not have enough air moving around to keep the fabric [floors, walls, roofs etc.] nice and dry. Condensation may form, things might start to get damp, and mould and blackspot may start to form which can have very harmful effects on occupants’ health and the building itself.

It’s recommended that some additional ventilation measures are introduced to get some extra nice, clean and healthy air into your occupants and your building again.

As it happens, the Building Regulations make specific provision for exactly this. There are some reference tables to help you assess how significant the retrofit fit work is, categorised as A, B or C and if you need to introduce extra ventilation. I won’t bore you with the exact documentation and how to find out this information but if you’d like to find out more just get in touch with me and ask away.

▶️ Category A means the retrofit works have not reduced the ventilation provisions below the minimum standards.

▶️ Category B means the retrofit works have reduced the ventilation provisions below the minimum standards.

▶️ Category C means the retrofit works have reduced the ventilation provisions significantly below the minimum standards.

If your retrofit work means you are either in Category B or Category C then you need to improve ventilation by natural means or mechanical means.
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Ventilation can be provided by natural means [using windows, trickle vents, or air bricks / wall vents] or mechanical, with systems like Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery [MVHR] capturing heat from stale exhaust air to pre-warm incoming air, reducing energy loss. Retrofitting older, drafty buildings often reduces natural ventilation, risking dampness and poor air quality, so assessing overall ventilation provision is important.

Ideally, using a fully ducted MVHR [Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery] system would be used but this isn’t always possible on all projects, often because of cost and disruption issues. Other mechanical ventilation systems can be used as well.

So, when completing a retrofit and upgrading with EEM’s, always complete an assessment of the overall building ventilation and how much other retrofit upgrade work has been completed that affects air tightness and the possibility of condensation occurring. Ensure ventilation is improved where necessary, in my opinion, this should happen in most cases unless very light touch minor retrofit work is being completed.

Hope this all helps a bit if you are involved with retrofit work or simply renovating and want to do things properly.

By the way, before 'retrofit' became a familiar industry buzzword, I called it renovation work and always tried to improve the energy efficiency of the old property at the same time as modernisation renovation work, by default. Over the last few years retrofit seems to have become more commonplace as a word and approach and slightly more regulated, but some of us have been quietly getting on with it for years anyway.

Behind the scenes: my own retrofit to our cold + drafty 1930’s house

We moved into our regular 3 bedroomed detached house in 2011 and back then the only insulation in the entire house was about 50mm of Rockwool quilt type insulation in the old loft space. The original leaded single glazed windows with some cracked panes were still in place. The winter of 2011 was really harsh, living in our house was not a pleasant experience, it was very, very cold.

Since then, to the slight disappointment of my patient wife, we’ve been slowly retrofitting and upgrading the old house to bring it up to current standards, as funds permit. My wife originally thought that when you buy a house all that needs to be done is to redecorate and install some new curtains and carpets. Unfortunately, she married a building nerd who is passionate about improving energy efficiency and occupant comfort, sorry! A lot of the retrofit upgrade work we have completed so far is not visible, it’s mostly invisible but has already provided huge benefits and value. Comfortable temperatures are being maintained and energy use is decreasing, [I know as I’m monitoring our monthly energy use].

We chose not to complete the popular, open plan Kitchen / Diner rear extension project, as we were happy with the existing layout and size. We could have spent loads of money [and resources] enlarging our house but we didn’t need to. The layout is of the old-fashioned separate Dining Room and separate Sitting Room / Lounge. We haven’t changed that. Crazy right, an architectural professional who doesn’t do what a lot of his Client’s want to do to their own properties.

I will provide more details of the overall retrofit works in another Newsletter in the near future but for today I just wanted to concentrate on the latest piece of work we completed, mainly the Dining Room retrofit.

January 2025 was the start of the latest Dining Room retrofit works and the plaster and flooring was stripped back to the bare bones in the middle of a bitterly cold and snowy month. The first couple of weeks frozen air blew through the entire house via the Dining Room, mainly the bay window.

In hindsight it would have made more sense to start the retrofit work and stripping out in the warmer months but this is how the timings fell and we didn’t want to wait any longer to get the work done. 🥶

Summary of the Dining Room retrofit is:

• Full strip back of the old, cracked plaster back to bare brick and floor / ceiling joists above and taking up the old floor boards to the floor joists below.
• New high performance timber framed double glazing, completed years ago.
• Cavity walls fully filled with BASF WallTite polyurethane gel insulation.
• The brick walls have been parge coated with rough plaster to seal up air gaps further and then drylined with a further thick insulated plasterboard to beef up the thermal performance of the walls further.
• A combination of ultra-high performance aerogel insulation and phenolic insulation was used to the hard-to-treat bay window timber framing. The aerogel insulation was installed to the front [room] face of the timber framing to eliminate thermal bridges.
• Thinner layers of insulation used at the window reveals on all four sides to reduce thermal bridging at these junctions too.
• Ground floors were heavily insulated to current regulations.
• Air tightness membranes were installed to the suspended timber floor and bay window timber framed element to reduce drafts.
• Hot water underfloor heating installed, using the Omnie Nu-Heat pre-routed chipboard decking system on top of the floor joists.

The improved thermal performance and air tightness meant we had to increase the background ventilation. We had an old open fireplace in the Dining Room, this was swept and then closed off. The fireplace hole was retained as a feature but fully insulated on all exposed faces, including the mini-ceiling of the fireplace recess. Fireplace and chimney vents were introduced as it’s good practice to introduce these anyway to reduce risks associated with condensation building up in redundant chimney stacks. These vents provided a double whammy impact by venting the chimney stack and also providing background ventilation, as I’ve already talked about in this Newsletter. This is backed up by a vented capping pot on top of the chimney stack so natural air movement passes through the room.

Wall vents are sometimes a bit ugly but we used a Rytons LookRyt Air Core product, which looks a bit nicer. The wall vent can be painted or even wallpapered so it is discreet. It does stick out from the wall a bit though. We added some timber battens to the wall and hung a mirror off these so there is an air gap behind the mirror so the vent is not blocked, but the wall vent is hidden from view.

As I’ve demonstrated, I’m not just talking about retrofit or working on retrofit to Client’s properties, I’m also working on a [slow] retrofit project to my own house. I understand the challenges and how to do things properly. We are definitely experiencing the benefits delivered by good quality retrofit.

It is financially costly, so far, over the last 14 years we’ve spent over £125k on the retrofit works, and I know this sort of budget is not available to everyone.

My wife is slightly less disappointed now though as the invisible work is being felt in a great many ways, especially at this time of year, as a lot of the house is now super warm and comfortable.

Still a lot yet to do but we are making real progress.

I’ll provide some other updates in the future, and about how we fixed specific issues in our house retrofit, such as the curved bay window timber framing, thermal bridges at door and window reveals and underfloor heating with carpets. Watch this space.

Click here to find out about a commercial retrofit project in Sheffield we're working on, in a very wonky building

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Want to retrofit to improve the energy efficiency and comfort of your home or place of work? Please do get in touch and we can kick things off with a chat.

Let's talk

New places

If you are new to my newsletter then each month, I share a photo of somewhere I've been. Just sharing something about my love of buildings and nature. I also love travelling to new places and cultures. Whenever I go on holiday, I try to take a few photos of buildings and places I find fascinating and interesting. I’m by no means a professional photographer but I’d like to share some of these places with you, hopefully they capture something of what I experienced.

Last month’s photo was taken in Croatia several years ago. I can’t remember the exact place but I think it was on the outskirts of an old medieval town called Trogir, an UNESCO world heritage site. We really liked Croatia, well worth a visit if you get a chance.

So, what do you think this is a photo of and where was this photo taken? If you think you know where the photo was taken or like the photo and want to find out more, hit reply and let me know.

You’ll have to wait until the next newsletter to find out where this photo is from. I know, I can feel the pent-up excitement from here.

What's next

Next time I will investigate if timber frame buildings are quicker and cheaper to build than say conventional brick buildings. I’ll be trying to dispel some common myths or common perceptions. Keep an eye out to find out more in a few weeks time.

There has also been some sad family news with some older members of my family passing away. Kind of expected but still sad nonetheless. This may sound like a cliché but try to enjoy life as much as you can right here right now, make good memories that last, with the people that matter the most to you. Life is fragile and fleeting, and far too short. Make sure you tell the people you love, how you really feel and don’t put it off until another day. 😍

That’s it for now, hope you enjoyed my little Newsletter. I’m looking forward to sharing more with you soon.

By the way, in case you are wondering, you’ve been sent this email because we’ve spoken in the past, perhaps discussing your project, or you have asked me a question via the website, social media or we have met in real life. I do hope you found this email helpful, entertaining and inspiring. However, if this is not the case, please hit unsubscribe at the bottom. I’ll try not to be offended, although I probably will be a little bit! I know, I know, it’s me, not you (it usually is).

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