Eco-friendly doesn’t have to be dull

While searching for eco-homes on the internet , we found a unique example of a home that is eco-friendly , but a modern home with all the features of a standard house:

'Zac Michaelis must be the envy of all his classmates. At six years of age he already has a sought-after address in Notting Hill and lives in one of the most spectacular examples of environmentally friendly design built in the capital. Add to this the fact that his home has an indoor swimming pool, BFG-size beanbag, pop-up TV and a slide besides the stairs and even his teachers could be forgiven for occasional pangs of jealousy.
But once you have met any member of the Michaelis family, any grudging feelings soon melt into admiration. You see, they are jolly nice and, over the past two years, they have been busting a gut to prove that eco-friendly architecture doesn’t have to be dull and worthy: it can be cool.

Zac’s dad is the architect Alex Michaelis of Michaelis Boyd Associates, known for designing sleek urban watering holes like the West London restaurant 192 and the Somerset hotel, Babington House. Yet the house he has built for himself, his paediatrician wife, Caroline, and their children, Zac, Kit, 4 and Ro, 2, is far from flash externally. A very ordinary, 6ft-high brick wall is the only mark that this project has left on the leafy avenue.

Press the silver buzzer, though, and you enter a different world. Sinking into the ground in front of you is a vast, white cube, its surface broken by expanses of glass. A curved entrance ramp pulls you towards an imposing glass door. This is more the Michaelis we were expecting.

Alex is a self-confessed eco obsessive who recycles pretty much everything and drives an electric car. His present crusade is to develop an environmentally friendly air-conditioning system, and he looks genuinely upset when talking about the waste problem currently plaguing the construction industry. So it seems strange that his house is made principally from concrete. ‘There really wasn’t any other solution,’ he explains apologetically. ‘We had to support the surrounding buildings and other materials just aren’t up to scratch when building this deep.’

According to Alex, ‘the way the house is designed, it’s so well insulated it hardly needs heating.’ Nevertheless, he has installed an ingenious system to service the house. A borehole, 100m deep, taps into the earth’s aquifer providing the water supply. Once this water has passed through a heat pump, it provides hot water, heating and the pool. Hot water solar panels, and photovoltaic panels which provide electricity, take the pressure off the heat pump and the swimming-pool works as a heat sink for the rest of the house, maintaining the temperature of the pool throughout the building.

The swimming pool looks super cool, is fantastic for the kids and has unexpected eco-advantages. ‘Say the pool is heated to 25°C then the rest of the house will stabilise at 25°C, says Alex. ‘This reduces our electricity consumption.’

These are big, impressive eco gestures, but they’re pricey. So what’s the relevance of the house to the rest of us? ‘At the moment eco friendly designs are more expensive,’ Alex admits. ‘We’re way behind Sweden, Norway, Switzerland which sell the technology I’ve used in the equivalent of the Ideal Homes Exhibition.’ But he adds, ‘As people in the UK become more environmentally aware, the costs will reduce. We simply have to move in this direction. Sustainability and environmental design are going to be the critical words in planning and architecture over the next 20 years.’ '

For the rest of this article and more , visit the Grand Designs webpage at :

http://www.channel4.com/4homes/magazine/grand_designs/gdm_underground.html