Britain’s housing debate is often framed as a trade-off: build more homes quickly or build better homes sustainably. Believing this dilemma to be real is one reason we keep repeating the same mistakes – homes that meet short-term targets but lock in long-term costs, from expensive energy bills to poor indoor air quality. The question we should be asking is simpler: how can we make “better” the default, at scale, and within real-world budgets?
One answer is emerging from experiments that began in Copenhagen and are now being used in the north-east of England. The Living Places concept – developed by the VELUX Group with Effekt architects and Artelia engineers – sets out to prove that homes can be “people-positive” and low-emission without waiting for breakthrough technologies. It combines ultra-low embodied carbon thinking with a focus on indoor climate – daylight, fresh air, thermal comfort – because housing that ignores health isn’t sustainable.
Living Places is built around five core principles that a home should be: healthy, affordable, simple, shared over time and scalable. This is a framework designed to be practical for the mainstream housing sector, not just showcase projects. The premise is that every design decision should be tested against both human outcomes (comfort and wellbeing) and planetary outcomes (carbon and resource use), which the Living Places work describes as a “people and planet” approach.
That “both/and” mindset matters in the UK, where policy and practice still too often treat operational energy, embodied carbon and health as separate boxes. Living Places argues you can’t decouple them: a home that is airtight but poorly ventilated can harm health; a home that is comfortable but carbon-intensive worsens climate risk; a home that is exemplary but unaffordable is irrelevant if it can’t be scaled.
Living Places Copenhagen – the first full prototype – was designed to demonstrate that a significantly lower carbon footprint can go hand in hand with healthy indoor climate in buildings constructed using readily available materials and methods. VELUX also ran live- in studies with dozens of guests to measure comfort and wellbeing in real use, not just in models.
The project’s influence has been recognised internationally and in the design industry. This matters because awards can help new approaches about how homes are built move from the margins and towards procurement frameworks, investor confidence and municipal adoption.
But the more important shift is that Living Places is no longer only a Danish experiment. It is now being translated into UK place-making – starting with Sunderland.
In May 2025, VELUX and Igloo Regeneration announced a partnership to build around 50 new homes in Sunderland, which was based on Living Places principles, as part of the broader Riverside Sunderland regeneration.
The homes are planned on a brownfield site near City Hall, with a mixed tenure including townhouses, maisonettes and apartments, intended for around 120 residents. The project is expected to commence in 2026 with completion projected for 2027.
That detail matters because it signals the move from prototype to delivery: brownfield constraints, mixed typologies, local authority ambitions, and the everyday realities of UK planning and construction.
It is also part of a wider civic transformation: Riverside Sunderland includes plans for 1,000 new homes, significant employment space, new public amenities and infrastructure – an attempt to make city-centre living attractive and viable again.
In the press release announcing the partnership, VELUX leadership emphasised not only carbon and energy standards but also “good ventilation and plenty of daylight” to support health and wellbeing. Meanwhile, Igloo framed the collaboration as “more than just building houses” – the ambition is to raise the bar for quality and wellbeing while “reimagining the way we live”.
For a UK audience, the Sunderland initiative should be read as a challenge to the idea that healthy, low-carbon homes are inevitably niche or expensive. It is an attempt to put a new definition of “value” into the mainstream: long-term resilience, lower emissions, and lived comfort – delivered through design choices that can be repeated.
If Sunderland shows how Living Places can shape new build, the latest proof of concept – Living Attic – makes the case for renovation as a people-and- planet strategy.
Officially presented in February this year, Living Attic documents a holistic renovation and attic conversion of a family home near Paris, turning an underused space into a brighter, healthier living area while radically improving energy performance.
The results are striking: the home moved from energy class F to A, adding 35m of usable attic space, with reported improvements to thermal comfort and indoor climate. The project describes a “90 per cent reduction in overheating” and a “carbon payback time” of ten years, positioning the work as a scalable model for renovation “in France and beyond”.
What’s important here is not the French policy context, but the transferable insight: decarbonisation is not just a new-build story. In the UK, where much of the 2050 housing stock already exists, retrofitting and smarter use of space – lofts, attics, adaptive reuse – can deliver carbon savings and comfort benefits expanding the footprint of existing buildings. Living Attic argues that meaningful improvements don’t require exotic solutions; they require coherent design thinking – insulation,
solar shading, thermal mass, natural and automated ventilation, and a whole-house view.
In other words, the Living Places principles can be applied to both how we build new homes and how we can live better in ones that already exist. And that is exactly what the UK needs.
Taken together, Sunderland and Living Attic point to an overdue reframing of what “housing delivery” should mean. If we continue to treat carbon reduction, indoor health, affordability and scalability as competing priorities, we will continue to build tomorrow’s problems into today’s so-called solutions. Living Places offers a pragmatic alternative: a set of principles designed for the messy middle – where cost, supply chains, skills and planning realities still apply.
The UK doesn’t need another shiny one-off. It needs pathways that local authorities, developers and supply chains can replicate. The Sunderland partnership is a credible test of that ambition in a British context. Living Attic reinforces the equally urgent retrofit story: healthier, brighter homes can be created by working with existing fabric and unused space – often faster and with less carbon than building new.
The most radical idea embedded in Living Places may be the least glamorous. It suggests that the future is not waiting for a miracle material or a breakthrough technology, but for the confidence to apply what we already know – at scale, with discipline, and without people’s well-being and lived experiences treated as an afterthought.
If Sunderland can prove that in the UK market – on brownfield land, in mixed tenure, within real constraints – then Living Places will have done something rare. It will have transformed sustainable, healthy housing from aspiration to routine. Hopefully the rest of the building industry will take notice.
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