Every Renovation story on the Moodroom blog.
The French duo who won the 2021 Pritzker do not renovate a facade so much as build a second, self-supporting one in front of it — an unheated winter garden that hands each flat tens of square metres while the tenants never move out.
Read story
Barrier tanking asks one unbroken layer to hold back the water table and fails invisibly the moment it is breached. A Type C cavity-drain system does the opposite, and BS 8102 puts the habitable grade in the sump and pump, not the plastic.
On a pre-1919 solid wall, internal insulation makes the masonry colder and slower to dry and buries the dew point inside it — so only vapour-open, capillary-active materials keep the wall, and its hidden joist ends, from rotting.
Secondary glazing keeps a period window in place and still beats a sealed replacement on noise, because a wide, open air cavity between two decoupled panes is a better acoustic and thermal spring than a hermetic 16mm unit, and that same unsealed cavity is what keeps the change reversible.
In a renovation, underfloor heating is chosen by the millimetres a fixed ceiling can spare and by the floor you already have, while its real payoff is the low flow temperature a heat pump craves.
A hinged door sterilizes almost six square feet of floor no furniture can use. In a compact home, choosing the right slider, or keeping the swing only where its arc is already empty, is often the single biggest space you can reclaim.
A sleeping mezzanine is the highest-yield move in a compact home — but only when the height to the real slab clears the full stack of headroom, structure and mattress. Here is the section math that decides it.
The seamless, curbless bathroom is 2026's benchmark layout, but its spa calm depends on a continuous waterproofing membrane and a floor fall you never notice, not on the microcement or tile on top.
Lining a solid wall on the inside is the cheapest way to warm a period room — and the retrofit most likely to rot it from within. The variable that decides the outcome is where the water vapour goes, not how thick the insulation is.
On a period home the original single-glazed window is often the greenest and quietest option in the room, if you draught-proof, repair and add secondary glazing instead of ripping it out.