The Future Home Series Part 8: Beyond the Future Homes Standard

The Home We Built for Winter

For generations, one of the great challenges of British housebuilding has been remarkably simple: how do we keep the heat in?

It is hardly surprising. Britain's climate shaped the homes we built. Cold winters, draughty windows and poorly insulated walls meant enormous amounts of energy were required simply to keep our homes comfortable. Gradually, we got better at it.

We insulated lofts and walls. Single glazing gave way to double glazing and, increasingly, triple glazing. We sealed gaps and reduced draughts, while building regulations demanded ever better thermal performance. Boilers became more efficient and, as we explored earlier in this series, the Future Homes Standard is accelerating the transition towards highly insulated homes heated increasingly by low-carbon technologies such as heat pumps.

It represents a remarkable improvement. A modern home can require substantially less energy to keep warm than one built only a few decades ago. Better insulation reduces heat loss through roofs and walls, better windows improve thermal performance, and greater airtightness prevents warm air simply disappearing through gaps in the building fabric.

In winter, that makes perfect sense.

When keeping heat in isn't enough

There is, however, another side to the equation. What happens when the problem isn't keeping heat in, but getting it out?

Britain's climate is changing, and summers that might once have been remembered for the occasional exceptionally hot day are increasingly bringing prolonged periods of high temperatures. At the same time, some of the features that make a modern home efficient during winter can create a different challenge during summer.

Sunlight entering through windows warms the interior, while people, appliances and electrical equipment generate additional heat. Well-insulated walls slow the movement of heat through the building fabric, and highly airtight homes can retain that warmth long after temperatures outside have begun to fall.

The house has become very good at doing exactly what we spent decades asking it to do: holding on to heat.

The problem is that it doesn't know whether it is January or August.

None of this means insulation or airtightness are mistakes. Far from it. Both are fundamental to reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions. But it does mean the Future Home cannot be designed around winter alone.

Building regulations already recognise the challenge. In England, Part O of the Building Regulations specifically addresses overheating in new residential buildings, including measures intended to limit unwanted solar gains and provide ways of removing excess heat.

That is an important step, but it also raises a much bigger question. The homes we are constructing today could still be occupied in 2100 and beyond, experiencing a climate significantly different from the one in which their regulations were written.

Building for a century of change

Once we begin thinking about the Future Home in those terms, other questions quickly follow. How will it cope with prolonged drought or intense rainfall? Should we continue using drinking-quality water for every household purpose, including flushing toilets? Can homes generate and store energy in ways that reduce pressure on national infrastructure? And can buildings adapt as technologies, families and lifestyles change?

There is also a question beyond the boundary of the property itself. Can the communities surrounding those homes provide the shade, green space, water management, biodiversity and resilient infrastructure that individual houses cannot provide alone?

Over the previous seven articles, we have looked largely at how the Future Homes Standard is changing the homes we build. In this final article, we are going to turn the question around.

Rather than asking what the Future Homes Standard requires today, we are going to ask:

What might the Future Home need tomorrow?

WaterMatters Insight

For generations, British homes have been designed around keeping warm. Climate change means the Future Home must increasingly do two things well: retain heat when it is cold and prevent overheating when it is hot. And that is only the beginning of the resilience challenge.

The Missing Summer

For much of Britain's housing history, summer comfort barely featured in the conversation because our climate did much of the work for us. Even after a warm summer's day, temperatures would usually fall sufficiently overnight for homes to cool naturally. Opening a window was often all that was required.

That assumption is becoming increasingly unreliable.

Recent summers have demonstrated what happens when high daytime temperatures are followed by warm nights and homes are unable to release the heat they have accumulated. Bedrooms remain uncomfortable long after sunset, upper floors become particularly warm, and large areas of glazing allow solar energy to enter during the day while buildings and the surrounding urban environment slowly release stored heat throughout the night.

For many of us, that is uncomfortable. For older people, young children and those with some underlying health conditions, prolonged overheating can become something considerably more serious.

The obvious response might appear to be air conditioning. Across much of the world, mechanical cooling is already a normal part of everyday life, and as British summers become warmer it seems reasonable to expect demand for domestic air conditioning to increase.

But simply installing an air-conditioning unit in every new home would create an uncomfortable contradiction. We would be designing increasingly efficient homes to reduce energy consumption during winter, only to increase electricity demand significantly by keeping those same homes cool during summer.

There is another approach.

Design first, cool second

Instead of beginning with the question of how to remove heat once it is inside a building, good design asks how we can prevent excessive heat entering in the first place. And that process starts before the first brick is laid.

The orientation of a house matters, as do the size and position of its windows. Large areas of glazing can provide wonderful natural light, but they can also allow substantial solar gain during periods of intense sunshine. External shading, including overhangs, shutters and awnings, can intercept high summer sun before it reaches the glass while still allowing lower winter sunlight into the home when its warmth is welcome.

Trees can perform much the same function. A carefully positioned deciduous tree provides shade during summer, reducing direct sunlight on windows and walls, then loses its leaves during autumn and allows more sunlight to reach the building through winter.

Suddenly, landscaping is no longer merely decorative. It becomes part of the home's climate-control system.

Ventilation matters too. A well-designed home can take advantage of cooler air when conditions allow, using cross-ventilation and night-time ventilation to release heat accumulated during the day. Thermal mass can also help moderate changes in indoor temperature by absorbing heat when temperatures rise and releasing it later when conditions become cooler.

None of these ideas is particularly futuristic. Many have been used in buildings for centuries. Before mechanical heating and cooling became commonplace, architecture had to respond much more directly to climate. Buildings used shade, orientation, courtyards, shutters, thick walls and natural ventilation because there was no machine available to correct poor climatic design afterwards.

Perhaps the Future Home has something to learn from the past.

That does not mean mechanical cooling will never have a role. As temperatures rise, there may be circumstances where active cooling becomes necessary, particularly for vulnerable occupants or during periods of extreme heat. Some heat-pump systems may also be capable of providing cooling as well as heating where their design, installation and regulatory context allow.

But active cooling should arguably be a later layer of protection rather than our starting point. The priority should be designing homes that remain comfortable for as long as reasonably possible without consuming additional energy.

Cooling the community

And that takes us beyond the house itself.

A home surrounded by tarmac, paving and unshaded streets exists in a very different summer environment from one surrounded by mature trees, vegetation and green space. Trees provide shade, plants contribute to local cooling through evapotranspiration, while green roofs, parks and green corridors can help moderate temperatures across neighbourhoods.

Conversely, large expanses of roads, roofs and hard landscaping can absorb solar energy during the day and release it afterwards, contributing to the urban heat-island effect.

Once again, we find ourselves returning to a lesson that has emerged repeatedly throughout this series. Whether we are managing rainfall, wastewater, energy or heat, some of the greatest opportunities appear when we stop designing individual houses in isolation and start designing communities.

The Future Home therefore needs to perform two apparently contradictory jobs. In January, it needs to capture warmth and prevent unnecessary heat loss. In August, it needs to limit unwanted solar gain and provide ways for excess heat to escape.

Those objectives need not undermine one another. The challenge is to design intelligently for both.

Because the home we build today does not get to choose the weather it will experience during the next hundred years.

We have to prepare it for both.

WaterMatters Insight

Cooling the Future Home should not begin with air conditioning. Orientation, shading, glazing, ventilation, thermal mass, trees and green infrastructure can all help prevent overheating before additional energy is required to remove it. The smartest cooling system may ultimately be the home and community themselves.

From Low Carbon to Climate Resilient

Reducing the carbon emissions associated with our homes is essential. But there is an important difference between a home that produces less carbon and one that is prepared for a changing climate.

A highly energy-efficient home may require relatively little energy to heat during winter yet still become uncomfortably hot during a prolonged summer heatwave. A home may use relatively little drinking water under normal conditions yet remain vulnerable if local water supplies become severely constrained. A development may meet demanding environmental standards while still be susceptible to flooding during an extreme rainfall event.

Perhaps, then, we need to add another question to the Future Homes conversation. We have rightly spent a great deal of time asking how we reduce the impact our homes have on the climate.

We also need to ask how we reduce the impact a changing climate has on our homes.

Designing for extremes

Climate change is not presenting Britain with one simple problem. We need homes capable of retaining heat during cold winter weather while remaining comfortable during increasingly hot summers. We need communities capable of dealing with intense rainfall without overwhelming drainage networks while simultaneously becoming more resilient to prolonged periods with very little rain. And as we electrify heating and transport, we need an electricity system capable of accommodating greater demand while making increasing use of renewable sources whose output naturally varies.

The Future Home therefore needs to cope not with one predictable set of conditions, but with increasingly wide extremes.

Earlier in this series, we explored Sustainable Drainage Systems and rainwater harvesting. Looked at together, they reveal an interesting connection between flooding and drought. Water creating a problem during periods of intense rainfall can, if captured and managed differently, become a useful resource when rainfall disappears.

Today's excess can become tomorrow's shortage.

Do we need drinking water for everything?

The pressure on Britain's water resources raises another, more fundamental question.

We have become accustomed to turning on a tap and receiving water treated to drinking-water standards. We quite reasonably use it for drinking and cooking, but also for showering, washing clothes, watering gardens and flushing toilets. We invest considerable resources in collecting, treating and transporting water to potable standards and then use a significant proportion of it for purposes that do not necessarily require drinking-quality water.

Efficient fittings, rainwater harvesting and alternative water supplies can reduce that demand. But should the Future Home eventually go further?

Waterless and extremely low-water sanitation technologies already exist. Composting toilets, vacuum systems and other approaches challenge one of the basic assumptions underlying the conventional British bathroom: that several litres of treated drinking water are required to transport human waste away from the home.

That does not mean we should suddenly install waterless toilets in every new house. There are significant questions around regulation, maintenance, public acceptance and waste treatment, while our sewer networks themselves have been designed around water carrying waste through them. Changing one part of the system inevitably affects another.

Nevertheless, during a period in which parts of Britain are experiencing drought and restrictions on water use, it seems reasonable to ask a deliberately provocative question:

If we were designing Britain's sanitation system from scratch for a water-stressed climate, would we still choose to use drinking-quality water to flush every toilet?

Perhaps we would. Perhaps we wouldn't. The point is that designing genuinely future-ready homes requires us to be willing to question assumptions inherited from a different climate and a different age.

Resilience is a system, not a product

There is unlikely to be a single piece of technology labelled climate resilience that can simply be installed in every new home.

Instead, resilience comes from layers. Passive design reduces dependence on mechanical cooling. Rainwater harvesting reduces demand for drinking water, while Sustainable Drainage Systems help manage intense rainfall. Solar panels and batteries provide greater flexibility around electricity, while trees can simultaneously provide shade, support biodiversity, intercept rainfall and contribute to cooling.

Individually, each intervention solves only part of the problem. Together, they create something more valuable: homes and communities better able to cope when conditions move beyond what we once considered normal.

Efficiency asks how little energy, water and other resources a home can use under normal conditions.

Resilience asks what happens when conditions are no longer normal.

The homes we are building today will need to answer both questions.

WaterMatters Insight

A low-carbon home reduces its contribution to climate change. A climate-resilient home is also designed for its consequences. The Future Home may need to do both, preparing for heatwaves, drought, intense rainfall and pressure on energy and water infrastructure rather than designing around yesterday's idea of normal weather.

A Home That Uses Less of Everything

Much of the Future Homes conversation naturally concentrates on what happens once somebody moves in. How much energy will the house consume? How will it be heated? How much drinking water will its occupants use? How much electricity might it generate?

But before anyone switches on a heat pump, opens a tap or plugs in an electric vehicle, an enormous quantity of resources has already been consumed simply constructing the home.

Concrete has been poured, steel manufactured, bricks fired and glass produced. Timber has been harvested, while insulation, plastics, plasterboard, wiring, pipework and countless other materials have been manufactured, transported and assembled.

The Future Home therefore has an environmental footprint before its occupants have spent their first night inside it.

Should a home designed to use fewer resources also require fewer resources to build?

The carbon we build into our homes

Historically, concentrating on the energy consumed during a home's lifetime made sense. Heating inefficient buildings with fossil fuels produced substantial emissions, so improving insulation and reducing operational energy consumption offered enormous benefits.

As homes become more efficient and electricity generation becomes progressively lower carbon, however, the emissions associated with manufacturing and constructing the building itself become increasingly significant.

This is generally described as embodied carbon. It includes emissions associated with extracting raw materials, manufacturing building products, transporting them and constructing the building. Whole-life assessments can extend that picture to maintenance, replacement and eventually what happens to materials at the end of their useful life.

There is an important difference between these emissions and those created by operating the home. Much of the carbon associated with construction has already been released before the homeowner receives the keys. We cannot reduce it later by turning down the thermostat.

It is already in the building.

That means decisions made on a drawing board can have environmental consequences lasting decades. The materials we select, the quantities we require, how far they travel, how long they last and what happens when they eventually need replacing all become part of the environmental performance of the home.

From consumption to circularity

For much of the modern economy, we have followed a broadly linear model in which resources are extracted, turned into products, used and eventually discarded. A more circular approach asks whether those materials can remain useful for longer.

In housing, that might mean using recycled or recovered materials where appropriate, reducing construction waste, designing components so they can be repaired or replaced, and making valuable materials easier to recover when they eventually leave the building.

The reality is more complicated than simply declaring one material good and another bad. A house must be safe, durable, affordable and capable of meeting demanding performance standards. A product with a greater initial manufacturing impact but a substantially longer service life may sometimes deliver a better whole-life outcome than one requiring frequent replacement.

Perhaps one of the most important principles is also one of the least futuristic:

Build things to last.

That applies to the technologies we install as well. Heat pumps, solar panels, batteries, inverters, EV chargers, ventilation systems and water-management equipment all provide potential environmental benefits, but all contain materials and will eventually require maintenance, repair or replacement.

Designing a sustainable home therefore cannot simply mean filling it with sustainable technology. We need to think about how easily that technology can be accessed, maintained and upgraded. Accessible pipework, cabling and equipment can make future alterations easier and reduce the waste created when components eventually need replacing.

Throughout this series, we have asked how to waste less heat, less electricity and less water.

Perhaps we should also ask:

How do we waste less house?

A home is not a disposable consumer product. The technologies inside it will change many times during its life, yet the building itself may remain.

The most sustainable Future Home may therefore not be the one containing the greatest number of environmental technologies on the day it is completed. It may be the one that consumes fewer resources throughout its life and can accommodate change without repeatedly ripping out and rebuilding what is already there.

Which brings us to perhaps the longest-term question of all.

If a home built today could still be occupied in 2126, how do we design it for people, technologies and circumstances we cannot possibly predict?

WaterMatters Insight

The environmental impact of the Future Home begins before anyone moves in. As operational energy use falls, the materials used to construct, maintain and adapt our homes become increasingly important. Using fewer resources, building for durability and designing for repair and replacement could become just as important as making the home efficient to operate.

The Hundred-Year Home

A house completed in 2026 could still be standing in 2126.

Consider how much has changed since 1926. Homes built then predated the widespread adoption of television, domestic refrigerators and washing machines, while central heating was far from the everyday expectation it would later become. Their builders could scarcely have imagined rooftop solar panels, electric vehicles, home batteries or broadband.

Yet millions of those homes remain occupied today. We have rewired and replumbed them, insulated and extended them, replaced heating systems and added technologies their original builders could never have anticipated.

My own home takes that argument considerably further.

Lessons from a two-hundred-year-old home

Built sometime between 1800 and 1820, my house predates not merely modern heating but domestic electricity and the water and sewerage systems we now take for granted. More than two centuries later, it is still fulfilling the purpose for which it was originally built: providing somebody with a home.

Almost everything around that basic purpose has changed. Electricity and modern plumbing arrived, heating systems evolved and telecommunications followed. More recently, I have added solar panels and a heat pump, technologies that would have been utterly unimaginable to the people who constructed the house.

Adapting a two-hundred-year-old building to twenty-first-century technology inevitably involves compromises. It wasn't designed for photovoltaic panels, modern electrical equipment or low-temperature heating, and incorporating them can be considerably more complicated than designing for them from the beginning.

But there is something remarkable about the fact that we can do it at all.

Buildings can last far longer than the technologies we put inside them.

My house didn't need to predict solar power in 1820 to accommodate it in 2026. What matters is whether the building can continue to change as the world around it changes.

That experience makes me wonder whether one of the most valuable characteristics we can build into the Future Home is not a particular technology at all.

It is adaptability.

Designing for what we don't know

Trying to predict the technology inside a home in 2126 would be largely pointless. The answer cannot be to anticipate every future innovation. It should be to create homes capable of accommodating innovations we haven't anticipated.

That can involve surprisingly ordinary design decisions. Accessible routes for future cabling and pipework can make later upgrades considerably easier. Electrical systems can be designed with future capacity in mind, while heating, energy-storage and water equipment can be positioned so that it can eventually be removed and replaced without major structural alterations.

A conduit installed during construction may cost relatively little. Creating the same route through a finished building decades later can mean lifting floors, opening walls and replacing finishes.

Sometimes the smartest way to prepare for future technology is simply to leave it somewhere to go.

Technology is not the only thing that changes. The people occupying the house change too. A young couple may have children who eventually leave home. A spare bedroom might become an office and later return to being a bedroom. An elderly parent may move in, or the original occupants themselves may grow older and find stairs, narrow doorways or conventional bathrooms increasingly difficult to negotiate.

A genuinely adaptable Future Home should be capable of responding to those changes without wholesale reconstruction. That does not mean building bigger homes in anticipation of every conceivable future need. Larger buildings consume more land, materials and energy.

Adaptability offers a different proposition:

Instead of building more house, build a house capable of doing more.

There is one prediction about the next hundred years we can make with reasonable confidence: almost every piece of technology we have discussed in this series will change long before the building reaches the end of its life.

That is why there is an important distinction between designing technology into a home and designing the home around a particular generation of technology. Accessible equipment, traceable services and replaceable components make it easier for a building to evolve without repeatedly dismantling significant parts of the house around them.

The phrase future-proof is frequently used in construction, but taken literally it promises something impossible. Nothing can be completely protected against a future we cannot predict.

Perhaps a better definition is a home designed on the assumption that requirements will change.

The question then becomes less about what technology we should install today and more about:

How difficult will it be to install something different tomorrow?

Building for people we will never meet

There is something rather humbling about thinking about a house on this timescale.

The people making decisions about a new home today may occupy it for only a small fraction of its eventual lifespan. Future families will live there. Children not yet born may grow up there. People we will never meet will alter it, repair it and probably complain about some inexplicable decision made by a builder decades earlier.

My own house has already been through generations of that process. I have no idea who will live there in another hundred years or what technologies they will consider completely ordinary. Some of the changes I have made today may eventually appear every bit as antiquated to them as parts of the original building now appear to me.

And that is rather the point.

The Future Home should not merely perform well on the day it receives its completion certificate. It should give future occupants the opportunity to make it perform well decades later, whether they are adapting it to a different climate, a different technology or simply a different way of living.

Perhaps the ultimate measure of a Future Home isn't how advanced it appears on the day it is built.

It is how gracefully it accommodates a future its designers could never have predicted.

WaterMatters Insight

We cannot predict what technology a home will need in 50 or 100 years. We can, however, make change easier. Accessible services, adaptable spaces, replaceable technology and flexible design could allow homes built today to evolve rather than repeatedly being ripped apart and rebuilt as our needs change.

The Future Community

Over the course of this series, we have spent a great deal of time looking inside the Future Home.

We have followed energy through its walls, examined how a heat pump moves warmth rather than creates it, traced drinking water from source to tap and wastewater on its journey in the opposite direction. We have looked at what happens to rain when it lands on the roof and how electricity can be generated above it.

But perhaps the biggest lesson from the entire series is that there is a limit to what any individual house can achieve.

However efficient, intelligent or adaptable we make it, a home does not exist in isolation. It sits on a street, within a neighbourhood, connected to energy, water, drainage, transport and communications networks.

If we genuinely want to build homes for the future, perhaps we need to stop thinking only about the Future Home.

Some problems are bigger than the house

A homeowner can install a rainwater harvesting system, but they cannot redesign the drainage network beneath their neighbourhood. They can reduce their drinking-water consumption, but they cannot create additional regional water resources. They can generate electricity on their roof and store some of it in a battery, but they remain connected to a national electricity system.

Likewise, a homeowner can plant a tree to shade a window, but they cannot single-handedly create a green corridor through an entire development.

Many of the challenges facing the Future Home are therefore community-scale problems.

There is another pattern here. Across both water and energy, many of the solutions we have explored involve a degree of decentralisation. Rather than asking national or regional infrastructure to manage everything, more can be generated, captured, stored, treated or reused closer to where it is needed.

We saw it with catchment-based wastewater solutions, SuDS and rainwater harvesting. In the previous article, we saw the same principle emerging through rooftop solar, home batteries and distributed electricity generation.

This does not mean replacing the National Grid, public water supplies or sewer networks. Those systems remain essential. It means complementing them with thousands of smaller interventions that collectively reduce pressure on the infrastructure everyone depends upon.

Local resources. Distributed solutions. Collective resilience.

Infrastructure should shape the development

Thinking at community scale also changes the way we approach infrastructure.

Too often, infrastructure can feel like something considered after the number and location of homes have already been decided. We determine where the houses will go and then ask whether roads, sewers, water supplies, electricity networks and other services can accommodate them.

Perhaps the Future Community requires us to reverse some of that thinking.

What water is available locally? Where will wastewater go? How will intense rainfall move through the development? Where can it be stored, reused or allowed to infiltrate? How will homes be heated and powered? Where should trees be planted to provide shade decades from now?

These questions are interconnected. A tree planted for summer shade can also intercept rainfall, provide habitat and contribute to cooling. A landscaped area designed as part of a Sustainable Drainage System can manage stormwater while providing green space and supporting biodiversity. Rooftop solar can help power a heat pump or electric vehicle, while battery storage can change when electricity is drawn from, or returned to, the wider network.

Once we start designing at community scale, the boundaries between individual technologies begin to blur.

What emerges is not a collection of environmental features bolted onto a housing development.

It is a system.

There is something particularly interesting about this decentralised model. Many of the assets remain individually owned. A homeowner may own the solar panels on their roof, the battery in their garage or the rainwater harvesting system beneath their garden, and receive direct financial or practical benefits from those investments.

Yet the benefits do not necessarily stop at the garden fence.

A home that captures rainfall can reduce pressure on shared drainage infrastructure. A property that reduces drinking-water demand leaves more capacity within the wider system. A battery can change when electricity is drawn from the grid, while surplus solar electricity can be exported for somebody else to use.

Individually, those contributions may be tiny. Across thousands or millions of homes, they become significant.

The Future Home may be individual. Its resilience is increasingly collective.

And amid all this technology and infrastructure, we should not forget why homes exist in the first place. They are places where people live. A successful Future Community should not simply consume less carbon, electricity and water. It should be a pleasant, healthy and practical place to call home, with green space, shade, biodiversity, safe ways to move around and the ability to adapt as its residents and their needs change.

Beyond the Future Homes Standard

None of this diminishes what the Future Homes Standard is trying to achieve.

Reducing the carbon emissions associated with new homes is necessary, and improving building fabric while moving away from fossil-fuel heating represents an important change in the way Britain builds.

But after eight articles exploring the Future Home, perhaps the most important conclusion is that low carbon should be regarded as a foundation rather than the finishing line.

The homes we build now will have to cope with a climate that continues changing long after today's regulations have been replaced. They will need to remain comfortable during hotter summers, use increasingly constrained resources wisely and adapt to technologies we cannot yet predict. The materials from which they are constructed will matter, as will their ability to be repaired, altered and upgraded.

And they will need communities around them capable of doing the things an individual house cannot do alone.

When we began this series, the question was relatively straightforward: what will the Future Homes Standard mean for the homes Britain builds?

Eight articles later, I think the more interesting question is larger.

What kind of homes and communities do we want to leave to the people who come after us?

We cannot know exactly what Britain will look like in 2050, let alone 2100. We cannot predict every technology those homes will contain or every challenge their occupants will face.

But we do know that the houses we build today will help shape that future.

Perhaps, then, the ambition should not simply be to build homes that meet the standards of 2026. It should be to build homes capable of meeting the challenges of a century we have only just begun to understand.

Because after eight articles about the Future Home, we keep arriving at the same conclusion.

The Future Home is not the destination.

The Future Community is.

WaterMatters Insight

The Future Homes Standard is an important step towards lower-carbon housing, but the homes we build today will face challenges extending far beyond energy efficiency. A more decentralised approach, combining national infrastructure with local energy, water and environmental solutions, can help create communities that are not only lower carbon, but more adaptable and resilient too.