This is what you get when one of Ireland’s most experienced low energy builders creates a home for his own family, with help from one of the country’s foremost ecological architects — a modern and elegant passive house that pays detailed attention to sustainability at every turn.

This issue features a striking spaceship home in Madrid and a rustic retreat in New York State.

This stylish contemporary upgrade and extension could provide a template for the deep retrofit of many family homes, with its owners aiming to bring it up to Enerphit, the passive house standard for retrofit, gradually rather than all at once.

In the summer of 2015, Cheryl Hitchcock and Dudley Thompson moved from an energy-hogging Victorian home into a new timber frame passive house in Cumbria’s Eden Valley. Below, they give a frank account of what their first year and a half in their new home has been like — and reveal how shockingly low their energy bills are.

The default answer when you want to do pretty much anything to a listed building is ‘no’. The default assumption if you want to achieve the Enerphit standard for retrofit is ‘tackle everything’. So how on earth do you retrofit a listed building to within a whisker of the Enerphit standard — with the blessing of the conservation officer?

A brand new passive-certified nursery at the University of Aberdeen provides the children of staff and students with a bright, warm and healthy space for learning and playing.