The Sustainable Home: Easy Ways to Live with Nature in Mind

By Ida Magntorn

Handy and inspirational tips and lists – how to reduce plastic consumption, clean with eco-friendly products and working with the seasons to bring the outdoors inside. A beautifully produced book on interiors with a focus on sustainability and wellbeing and creating a home with the environment in mind.

Inspiration and tips for creating a sustainable home without compromising on style.

In The Sustainable Home, interiors writer and photographer Ida Magntorn shows how to create a harmonious, beautiful and functional home that is sustainable in the long run. Taking inspiration from real homes, and following the motto reuse, reduce, recycle – Ida shares new ways to think when decorating – combining low environmental impact with individual style.

Room by room, she offers practical and positive advice to create a greener home, including:

Clever ways to eco-boost the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room and laundry

Choosing natural paint colours and lighting that will save energy and boost your mood

Where to find great second-hand furniture (and best options if you buy new)

Inspiration for changing up your décor without buying anything

How to go on a plastic diet

A guide to locally sourced plants and flowers to green your air and how to propagate them

How to make your own cleaning products without chemicals

How to sort your waste

Big changes and small tweaks sit side by side, with the aim to make everyday life as free from toxins and as eco-friendly as possible. Illustrated throughout with photographs of homes that are both sustainable and aesthetically pleasing, going beyond Scandi minimalism to show elements of industrial and natural, pops of colour and hints of maximalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Oct 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9780008601508

Ida Magntorn

Ida Magntorn is a writer and photographer with a focus on interiors. She has written blogs for ELLE Decoration and Femina, writes features for several lifestyle magazines and has been named Sweden’s second hand expert by Erikshjälpen. Ida’s other books include The Flea Market Book, From Flea Market to Fine Salon, Home Style by City and Home Stories. Her books have been translated into several languages.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

How can you create a home that is good for the environment, sustainable in the long run and at the same time harmonious, individual, exciting and interesting?

We all know the score – we live beyond the earth’s means. The current total population of the world would need the resources of 1.7 earths, and in the UK the equivalent of 2.7 earths, to cover what we consume. Using less of nature’s resources and limiting emissions of carbon dioxide are essential for the planet to be habitable in the future.

Now, this may sound bleak and difficult, but there are many ways we can contribute to turning the tide. In this book, I focus on how we can adopt an eco-friendly approach when we decorate, partly by using examples from my own home, and partly by looking at tips from others – everything from reusing what you already have and clever flea market finds to making bouquets from locally grown flowers, cleaning in an eco-friendly way and making your home more energy-efficient. You will also get tips on how to go on a plastic diet, which lighting is the best and how to choose a climate-smart mattress. The big and the small side by side, in other words.

In a practical sense, this approach builds on the expression reduce, reuse, recycle (as opposed to buy, use, throw away). In the long run it’s about aiming for a fully circular economy: to recycle, mend and regard what’s intended to be thrown away as a resource. Read more about the circular economy here.

When you decorate a completely new home, or when you just feel like making small changes and perhaps buying something extra, it’s time to stop and consider. Perhaps you can try rearranging furniture you already have, or see if you own things that you can alter or freshen up? Make something new from something old. And if you really don’t find what you need at home, see if you can buy it second hand. Either you can look for something to use just as it is, or find an object that, with some work, can be transformed into something else.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

THINGS TO CONSIDER

when you want to decorate in an eco-friendly way:

USE WHAT YOU’VE GOT. It doesn’t matter how eco-friendly your new kitchen is if it has replaced one that was still in working order.

IF YOU’RE TIRED of what you’ve got, think about whether you can remake, paint or perhaps transform an object into something completely different.

BUY SECOND HAND if you absolutely have to buy something.

LOOK FOR PRODUCTS THAT CAN BE RECYCLED – solid wood instead of veneer, for example. The easier a piece of furniture is to sand down or remake, the more likely it is to be a long-term purchase. And don’t forget to recycle!

IF YOU REALLY CAN’T FIND ANYTHING SECOND HAND, go for design classics when you buy new. They are usually of superior quality and therefore also have a high second-hand value. Also keep in mind that most design classics can actually be found second hand. Look around at some auction sites; see tips here.

IF YOU STILL CHOOSE TO BUY NEW, go for eco-labelled items if you can. Find out which components in the product the certification refers to.

TAKE CARE OF WHAT YOU’VE GOT. By looking after your furniture and other possessions, you will extend their lives and save the energy and materials that would have been used to produce replacements. Plus you won’t contribute to the rubbish mountain.

Before we further explore eco-friendly design room by room, it is helpful to look at a bit of background and terminology relating to the earth’s resources.

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THE EARTH’S RESOURCES

The global average temperature is rising due to large emissions of greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide. Environmental damage is everywhere. When it comes to our homes, it is caused by everything from how our furniture is produced and transported to things that might not always spring to mind, such as how your Friday bouquet of flowers has been cultivated.

YOUR ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT is the impact that your behaviour and consumption have on the earth’s resources. In the UK we emit on average approximately 12.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person per year. We need to do all we can to bring this under 1 tonne to limit global warming.

Calculate your own ecological footprint:

footprint.wwf.org.uk

footprintnetwork.org

footprintcalculator.org

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HOW MUCH IS A KILO OF CARBON DIOXIDE?

It’s very easy to end up talking in numbers and comparisons when you want to get to grips with the breadth of the climate issue. To help you visualize how much 1 kilo of carbon dioxide is, think like this: 1 kilo of lead of course weighs the same as 1 kilo of cotton. But cotton takes up a much larger area since lead is more dense. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is less dense than cotton. 1 kilo of carbon dioxide takes up 0.5 cubic metres, which is about the equivalent of three bathtubs.

However, it can be useful to remember that everything is relative, and numbers that might sound sky high can in fact be fairly low when seen from a different perspective. Here’s an example:

PARAFFIN VS STEARIN

If we consistently swapped the climate-damaging paraffin candle for candles made from stearin, it would cut our carbon emissions by the same amount as if we removed 15,000 petrol cars from the roads. That is as many cars as are in Newquay in Cornwall, which might seem