It has has been said that the battle for greater sustainability in the home will be fought on a material front. I for one am always appalled at the hidden damage many conventional materials that we use create and am similarly thrilled to find new materials that tackle the same functional issues but without [...]
Category Archives: Materials
Bored Of Cotton? Here Are Some Brilliant New and Unique Sustainable Fabrics For The Home
March 1, 2012 – 4:24 pm
Recycling your old kitchen: ingredients for better living
January 12, 2012 – 4:04 pm
Designing a new kitchen is an exciting opportunity to really focus on reducing your future use of resources in one of the most energy-hungry rooms in the house. But just what do you do with your old kitchen? It’s shocking how many kitchens are replaced before the end of their useful life, and this is [...]
Nanotechnology – tiny solutions to big problems facing eco homes?
December 16, 2011 – 10:15 am
Most people have heard of nanotechnology but cant quite picture the benefits. That’s hardly surprising when you consider that nanotechnology refers to actions below a scale of 110 nm (where one nm is one-billionth of a metre). And to put that into perspective, a hazelnut is roughly one-billionth the size of Earth. That’s pretty [...]
My favourite Eco-Friendly Christmas Decorations for this Year
December 9, 2011 – 4:59 pm
What’s not to love about this mid winter festival of ours, although every year I get hit with a pang of just how am I going to do all this decorating and Christmassy stuff and still make it sustainable. Creativity, inspiration and upcycling is what’s called for. When it comes to decorating my own tree [...]
Sofa, So Green
December 2, 2011 – 3:38 pm
Choosing eco home furnishings can be really tricky. Particularly for items that are a little more complex in their manufacture and don’t necessarily have a daily energy use. Subsequently, the provenance of manufacture and materials, embodied energy and durability of these pieces really comes into question. Sofas are a prime example of a high-ticket, [...]
Edible Household – Playing With Your Food
November 16, 2011 – 10:45 am
So if we can’t explore a few crazy ideas in this blog, where can we? And with that liberating and mouth watering thought in mind, I thought I’d share with you a few designers who are cooking up a storm with their edible furniture and accessories. It’s clear, if you watch TV on ANY given [...]
Never Felt Better: The Many Uses Of Pressed Wool for eco homes
November 11, 2011 – 12:20 pm
Felt is one of those under-used but “designers’ favourite” materials. And as one of the earliest fabrics created, it has been for a very long time. Natural felt is made using wool in a wet or dry process and utilises the wool fibre scales and kinks to bond or matt the fabric together. For [...]
A Million Little Pieces: The Magic of Mosaics
November 1, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Patchworks are a key way to use materials in the world of eco design. And I just love them. Simply put, they offer the opportunity for small, otherwise unusable parts of material to have a new and useful life. Whilst big slabs of materials might look bold and impressive, they are also inefficient as they [...]
10 Green Bottles…And Just What Eco Designers Did With Them Next
October 25, 2011 – 8:32 am
We take so many of the materials we use and dispose of everyday for granted. But if we were just to stop for a moment and take a closer look, we might see incredible potential in the products we often call rubbish. What I love about the trend for upcycling wine bottles is that you [...]
Log in and Branch Out: Natural Wooden Furniture In The Home
October 19, 2011 – 8:59 am
Bringing nature into the home can mean so much more than just treading mud into the hallway carpet. What we’re seeing at the moment is a new generation of designers finding ways to create furnishings from unprocessed materials. This allows the softness and elegance of natural forms to add a unique organic richness to your [...]
