 For many years we have been supporting an environmentally responsible approach to building through our use of recycled materials and traditional techniques. We now use, as far as possible, renewable and environmentally friendly materials for all our work. All the timber we use is FSC certified and much of the hardwood we use for conservation work comes from Devon.
We use natural insulation when ever possible or made from recycled materials. We finish our joinery with traditional paints or oil based finishes.
Our aim is to make buildings which ‘breath’, giving an atmosphere within that is better for the inhabitants and the building whilst minimizing heat loss.
We can produce buildings ranging from traditional timber frames with straw bale infill to modern, fully insulated systems such as Steico
 NATURALLY BREATHABLE WOOL insulation, such as Thermafleece, being hygroscopic, can absorb and desorb water vapour without compromising its thermal efficiency. It is therefore ideal for use in roofs and timber framed walls designed to avoid a damaging build-up of moisture.
Wool generates heat when it absorbs moisture from the air. When the air is saturated with water vapour, wool absorbs some 40% of its dry weight in moisture, producing 960 kilojoules of heat energy for every kilogram of dry wool. This warmth acts to prevent condensation in construction cavities by maintaining the temperature above the dew-point in damp conditions.
The manufacture of wool insulation consumes minimal energy using only 14% of the embodied energy that is used to manufacture glass fibre insulation, therefore paying back its manufacturing energy cost seven times faster than glass fibre.
The use of Thermafleece in a 100mm cavity of a timber framed wall or floor can improve the sound reduction index by approximately 8dB (almost a halving of the original sound level).
Please contact us for a price
HEMP INSULATION
 Isonat is made from hemp and recycle cotton fibres and makes a superb natural insulator, offering very similar properties to Thermafleece (wool insulation) and IsoVlas (flax insulation). Fire and pest resistance is added through treatment with inorganic salts. Isonat is suitable for use as loft, wall and underfloor insulation. It has the added advantage of taking in CO2 during growth which is locked into the finished insulation.
Hemp insulation also offers good levels of accoustic insulation similar to wool
 We prefer to use lime rather than cement, as besides its beneficial properties of permeability and elasticity it also has lower embodied energy than cement. It can be used from the limecrete in the floor to the limewash on the walls (lime rendered of course!)
Walls that are rendered with lime can breath, allowing dampness within the wall to dry out rather than be trapped behind hard cement renders. Older properties which have suffered from years of dampness can often be made considerably drier and more pleasant to live in by replacing the cement render with lime
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