Back in 2008, House & Garden published a Green by Design supplement, for which the then Prince Charles, now King of course, wrote the foreword and explained his philosophy of environmentally-friendly design. 16 years on, it bears witness to how forward-thinking King Charles is when it comes to green architecture. “Why,” he asks in the piece, “does being green mean building with glass and steel and concrete and then adding wind turbines, solar panels and waterheaters, sedum rooves, glass atria – all the paraphernalia of a new ‘green building industry’ – to offset buildings that are inefficient in the first place?”
This question formed the main thesis of his foreword, which focussed on why green architecture means new architecture when we have such a strong housing stock in the UK. Granted, there are issues with Victorian houses, particularly around damp, but one thing which King Charles took great pleasure in in the supplement was the restoration of a 500-year-old farmhouse. “Traditional homes - from the humblest to the grandest,” he continues, “were built to conserve as much precious fuel as possible, through solid walls, windows in the right place and of the right size, sounder foundations, stronger roof trusses, stouter doors and most importantly, an ability to change, making them adaptable from generation to generation.”
In contrast to this, he suggested that many of the add-ons he mentioned initially (wind turbines and so on) “are mere gestures, at best” and “their impacts on home energy consumption can now be measured and usually offer scant justification for the radical nature of the design on the drawing board.”
“We must act now,” he urged, “by using traditional methods and materials to work with Nature rather than against Her, while incorporating the best of contemporary ecotechnology in an integrated and sympathetic manner.” Such ecotechnology could include heat pumps, the newest form of green energy to heat our homes, but one which has far to go. It is wildly expensive to add one to your house, even with the relevant government grant, and most houses in the UK are not suitable to retrofit with such technology. As the King rightly put it, “we need to resist the urge to seize on slick, highly marketed techno-fixes and, instead, pause to reflect on the challenges of locally-sourced materials, long-lived and adaptable solutions and learning from the local vernacular.”
This foreword was not the first time he expressed a preference for tradition; back in 1984, he addressed the Royal Institute of British Architects on its 150th birthday. During that speech, he said architects seemed to be “ignoring the feelings and wishes of the mass of ordinary people in this country,” and described a proposed glass and steel extension to the National Gallery as “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.” As a result, the project never went ahead and its place we have instead the post-modernist Sainsbury Wing, designed by Robert Venturi to work with its classical neighbour rather than against it.
“The main point I want to make is that we already have most of the answer to building sustainably - believe it or not, in the form of well-tried, time-tested tradition,” was how the King summarised his essay for House & Garden, returning to the idea that we need to look back in order to move forward. His sign off – “Readers can judge for themselves the resultant harmony of a place that has grown over time, surely the definition of true sustainability” – rings true now and should be a call to us all to look at what we have, see how we can improve that and stop thinking we need something new all the time.
King Charles's own former Welsh home, adapted from a former model farm in Carmarthenshire, bears witness to his philosophy of sustainable building, with a structure traditionally made from existing and locally sourced materials, an ecologically sound heating system, and elegant interiors that harmonise perfectly with the architecture. It was architect Craig Hamilton who rigorously implemented King Charles's philosophy of building sustainably here: materials were reused, other materials sourced locally, and the craftsmen and builders who worked on the project were based locally. Housed in a new barn is a wood-chip boiler, which provides heating and hot water for the entire complex. A reed-bed filtration system was installed, as was rainwater storage.
Over at Highgrove, his 18th-century family home which he's owned since the 1980s, sustainable practices including solar panels and a natural sewage filtering system govern the running of the house and grounds. On the interiors side, at the King's Cornish house burnt red and moss green kilims made by Weaver Green are laid throughout. Based in Devon, this forward-thinking company has devised a technique of weaving from recycled plastic bottles that is in keeping with King Charles’s interest in sustainability; the result feels remarkably like wool.
