"Eco-Homes" For Sale in London

Well, they call it an eco-home. It is a solid wood Slovenian prefab system called RIKO that is made from glue laminated pine for the interior and timber cladding on the exterior, a layered system that is up to eight inches thick, all from sustainably harvested forests. The walls are panellized and shipped complete with windows and doors. Three full houses were shipped in five trucks and assembled in central London in five days.

There are a couple of eco-brownie points earned- a lot of carbon is sequestered, wood is a good insulator so fuel will be saved in heating it, as it was in building it. (Five hundred kilowatt hours are needed to produce a single cubic metre steel, 200 kWh are needed for concrete, but only 30 kWh are used for timber.) Furthermore wood interiors are generally healthy homes with good air quality.

Throw radiant heating underfoot and a green sedum roof overhead and that is a pretty green package.

Perhaps coming from the toothpick school of building as we do in North America makes me just a little concerned about the volume of wood involved in solid walls, and whether it is really the most efficient use of the material. Thats a lotta trees in there. On the market for £775,000. ::Find a Property