Are homes becoming too technical?

To most of us Wordsworth is the poet who wrote the world’s most famous poem about daffodils – a distinction that fades a little when you try to think of any others.

To film buffs he’s Austin Powers’ cousin seven times removed. And to the Lake District, where he was born and died, he’s a major tourist attraction. Or rather, the cottage in Grasmere where he and his sister and fellow writer Dorothy lived for eight years at the start of the 19th century.

Visit Dove Cottage, as I did recently, and you gain a fascinating insight into a way of living – and building – that’s both reassuringly familiar and worryingly bleak.

The two-storey cottage is nestled into a hillside, which leaves two ground floor rooms semi-submerged and the garden rising steeply at the rear. The walls are of local limestone, whitewashed at front and back, the roof of local blue-grey slate.

Heating was provided by coal fires, venting into eight chimneys, each topped with two slates, leaning into each other, to fend off Cumbrian weather.

All in all it’s a traditional vernacular build, which, in outward appearance, might easily be replicated today.

Inside, however, its age becomes clearer. A small porch opens into two medium-sized rooms, both wood-panelled, the first known as the ‘front parlour’ or ‘home room’.

The ground floor is laid with slate flags, unusual for a modest home of the period, where rushes were more common. Luckily for the Wordsworths, Dove Cottage was originally an inn and needed sturdier flooring.

The kitchen is dominated by a large, cast-iron range, fed from an equally large coal store. A smaller adjoining room acted as a larder/cold room, mainly because a stream runs under the floor.

Upstairs, the largest room faces the nearby lake and was used as a sitting/working space. A smaller room is lined with copies of The Times in an early attempt at insulation.

What’s conspicuous is the lack of taps: water had to be fetched several times a day from a nearby well. And lighting. ‘Rush lights’ – locally gathered rushes dipped in fat – typically provided that. The toilet was in the garden.

By modern standards, of course, it’s all pretty basic. Nowadays, Building Regulations ensure new homes are well insulated, draught–free, heated and ventilated to a degree that would have astonished – and probably baffled – the owners of Georgian Britain’s most luxurious properties.

We have, in fact, come pretty close to the definition of a house by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, one of the main inventors of architectural modernism. Le Corbusier’s buildings were typically white concrete boxes, with open-plan interiors, plain white walls and acres of glass. To Le Corbusier, a house was simply ‘a machine for living in’.

Fifty years after his death, his influence is still strong, but recently it’s been growing stronger, though not entirely in the way he envisaged.

Le Corbusier began to develop his theories after falling in love with reinforced concrete, partly because it enabled buildings to be easily prefabricated and modular. Today, thanks to the falling numbers of traditional tradespeople, Britain’s leading house builders are also embracing prefabrication.

Dirty word

They’re keeping quiet about it because it’s still a mildly dirty word. Older house buyers remember post-war ‘prefabs’ and collapsing apartment blocks, while lenders still recoil at any hint of ‘non-standard’ construction (i.e. non-brick and block).

But homes built in entirely conventional ways are also following Le Corbusier’s lead by becoming more machine-like. Until 2006, for instance, openable windows and trickle vents – small slots in the tops of windows – satisfied the ventilation requirements of the Building Regulations.

Now, to handle increasing levels of insulation and airtightness, kitchens, bathrooms and utility rooms must be fitted with mechanical extractor fans. Meanwhile, smart technology is enabling us to mechanise and automate more and more of the home’s functions. One obvious end result of these measures is a zero-energy home, due to become standard in the EU by 2050. Currently the best established method of building one is the German Passivhaus system.

Here, the house is super-insulated and completely sealed. Moist stale air from wet rooms is drawn to a central heat exchanger where it warms incoming fresh air, which is then circulated throughout the home. The process is continuous and ensures constant fresh air at a constant temperature. It’s so energy efficient central heating isn’t needed.

But it does demand very high standards of construction, a lot of large diameter ducting and moderate but regular maintenance. In effect, it turns a house into an – admittedly very pleasant –machine for living in.

So what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except that machines don’t last for ever, and the needs they meet change. Passivhaus grew out of Germany’s cold winters and limited energy supplies. In warmer climates it needs different orientation, careful shading and a degree of air conditioning. As this spring’s mini-heat wave indicated, Britain’s temperatures are rising and heavily insulated homes are already overheating.

But there are less mechanised ways of keeping homes comfortable. Passive stack ventilation allows warm, moist air to rise naturally through vertical ducts to a roof terminal. Fresh air enters through trickle vents or inlets that open automatically when humidity levels rise. The system isn’t as precise as Passivhaus, but it’s maintenance-free and uses no power.

Careful design can achieve similar effects by orientation, built-in shading, especially of large areas of south-facing glass, external insulating shutters to keep out heat, and internal shutters to keep it in.

Building materials, too, can make a vital difference. The Wordsworths’ cottage may have been draughty and reliant on coal fires, but once heated its thick stone walls acted as a thermal store in winter and kept the interior cool in summer.It shows that most of the problems we face creating modern homes have been tackled before. Studying the most successful may be as effective as concentrating on the latest technical advances.

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