69 Keslake Road, NW6
The origin — and the project that taught the method by taking the easy answer away. The first scheme for Keslake was ambitious in the way 2001 understood “green”: a ground-source heat pump and twenty-eight photovoltaic panels on the rear roof, renewables bolted onto a Victorian terrace. The drawing here is that scheme. Brent Council refused it.
What got built was the opposite approach — and it became the way Green Agent works. With the machinery off the table, the only way to make the house perform was the fabric itself: internal wall insulation, full double glazing in FSC sash windows cut to the original 25mm glazing-bar proportions, recarved stonework and reinstated brick piers, sheep’s-wool and loft insulation, and Tierrafino clay plaster — chosen because it regulates humidity and temperature through the wall rather than off-gassing into the room.
Mains-gas condensing boiler & underfloor; wood-burning secondary
£598.84 of electricity across 385 days, 2009–10
One of the early deep retrofits of a Victorian terrace to reach an EPC of C — at a time when nobody was using the word “retrofit.” Not through bolted-on renewables, but by making the fabric do the work.
It took a planning fight to get there. The line that sums it up, from the correspondence with Brent Council:
“Conservation is not supposed to mean that the buildings cannot be improved.”
That argument — that protecting a building and improving how it performs are not opposites — is the same one Green Agent makes today.
36 Kingswood Avenue
The follow-on to Keslake Road. Super-insulated, double-glazed, and more measured — the place where the lessons from the first prototype were refined into a repeatable approach rather than a one-off experiment. What was kept, what was changed, and why.
8 Gayton Crescent, Hampstead
The current Green Agent flagship, and a third major residential retrofit. A wider-than-average Victorian semi being taken back to its fabric and rebuilt to behave as an adaptive environmental system — material-led, fabric-first, with the systems following the building rather than propping it up.
The decisions here aren’t styling choices; they’re about how this house will perform, hold its value and look after the people in it for the next several decades.
