Home
Air, light, materials and the spaces we live in.
You spend most of your hours indoors, which makes the home the highest-leverage object you own. Air quality, daylight, temperature and the chemistry of the surfaces around you do more for how a day feels than almost anything you can buy for it.
This topic sits closest to Sustainable Living, and deliberately so: the same four questions about materials, waste, energy and ethics decide whether a home is good to live in as well as defensible to have built.
What we keep asking
- What is it made of, and what does it release into the room?
- Can it be cleaned, repaired and replaced in parts?
- Does the building work for the people in it, or only on the drawing?
Guides
Nothing published under this heading yet. The reading below covers the same ground from elsewhere on the site.
Start here
- Sluishuis: living in a super-sustainable building →A building read through all four lenses, from the inside.
- Low-emission paint, room by room →The most direct thing you can change about indoor air.
- Six eco laundry detergents, tested →What goes down the drain, and what it costs per wash.
- Materials →How we judge what a thing is made of before it enters a house.
Next topic: Movement