Diary Of An Eco-Builder

Is a house green if the people who live in it squander resources and burn fossil fuel?

This morning I turned on my computer and downloaded seven overnight e-mails from our architect, Peter Smithdale. Among other things, they concerned ventilation ducts, underfloor heating controls, coping stones for our garden walls and shower drainage. In principle, our contractor is building a house that Peter drew seven months ago. In practice, there is an endless stream of details to resolve, a process that potentially includes negotiations with contractor, site foreman, engineer, suppliers and (not least) an ambitious client with a time-consuming habit of pushing everything beyond standard practice.

We feel very lucky to have had Peter's professional support over the last two years. Every one of our ideas has been treated with critical respect, so we feel deeply involved in the design of the house. Although Peter is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, he does not conform to the stereotype of the profession expressed by the alternative meaning of RIBA: "Remember - I'm the bloody architect!"

It helps, of course, that Peter shares our interests; we approached his firm, Constructive Individuals (020-7515 9299, www.constructiveindividuals.com), because they were ecological architects with experience of working with self-builders. But what we've really valued is Peter's willingness to look beyond the technical aspects of our zero-carbon brief and work with our metaphor, to help us design a house that captures the spirit of a tree.

Although the question of what "counts" as ecological building tends to focus on the details of construction and performance, there are many wider issues raised by this concept. For example, is a house "green" if the people who live in it still squander resources and burn fossil fuels in every way they can? Here we certainly hope to follow the lead of BedZed in south London (www.bedzed.org.uk), where very high-performance housing is integrated with live-work spaces, car clubs, local food schemes, recycling and public transport.

At another level, ecological building can be a creative response to the natural world. This may mean integrating buildings with their landscape and setting, exploiting organic forms in the shape of the building, or drawing on deeper principles of nature's design in the philosophy of a project. With Peter's support, we have sought to capture all these qualities in Tree House. The house is a respectful response to the mature tree that dominates the plot. The form of the tree is subtly picked up in the macro and micro design; and the house will work like a tree, drawing all its energy from the sun and thriving in harmony with its natural environment.

We were encouraged to imagine a house that captured the form and beauty of a tree by a building that Peter introduced us to: Alvar Aalto's Villa Mairea. A year ago we embarked on an odyssey to Finland to visit this remarkable house, which combines the discipline of Modernism (it was built in 1938) with a response to the forest in which it is built. It may not be an eco-house by today's technical standards, but its integration in its setting and the evocation of the forest in its design provide a fine example of what a modern response to nature can achieve.

Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Falling Water is another profound response to a natural setting, once said that physicians could bury their mistakes, whereas architects could only recommend the planting of vines to their clients. I have already bought the vines - Ampelopsis megalophylla, to be precise - but Peter can rest assured that they are an integral part of our summer-shading strategy, and are most certainly not a veil of embarrassment.