Our Green Home

I’m Julia and I live in France with my family. We live in an eco-friendly house that my mum designed. She’s an architect and she works from home. She wanted to build a house that was comfortable for the family, a good place to have her office but also good for the environment.

Our house has got three bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor. Mum’s office is downstairs on the first floor and it’s got a huge balcony with a great view of the countryside. The ground floor is open plan which means that the kitchen and sitting room are in one big space.  

It’s a modern house but it is unusual because it is made from mainly recycled materials: wood, old tires, stone and plastic bottles. There are solar panels on the roof so that most of our energy comes from the sun. The roof is green because it is made from turf, moss and herbs. In the summer there are wild flowers on it too – it’s a beautiful living thing!

Although our house doesn’t use much energy, we are always careful not to waste any. My twin brothers make sure that we all switch things off at the wall (like the TV) when we aren’t using them. We use energy saving lightbulbs and wear warm clothes when the weather starts to get cold so we don’t need to put the heating on yet.

Some people think our house looks strange but as more people understand the problem of climate change, I think houses like ours will be quite common in the future.