Keep Your Historic Home Warm & Dry: Breathable Insulation Services
Living in a beautiful period property in Cheltenham or the Cotswolds shouldn't mean freezing through the winter or paying extortionate heating bills.
If you have solid brick or stone walls, you already know how fast the heat escapes. But finding the right way to insulate an older home can feel like a minefield. You need a solution that drastically improves your comfort and Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating, without damaging the historic fabric of your building.
The Danger of Standard Foam & Stud Walls
If you ask a standard builder to insulate a cold solid wall, their first instinct is usually to build a timber stud frame inside your room and pack it with foil-backed foam boards. For a traditional property, this is a recipe for disaster.
Those modern foam boards act like plastic wrap. They are completely non-breathable. When installed against a cold solid wall, they trap natural moisture, leading to hidden black mould, rotting timbers, and severe damp. Furthermore, building bulky timber stud frames eats up inches of your valuable floor space.
Our Breathable Insulation Services
We upgrade the thermal performance of period homes safely. We use high-performance, entirely natural systems that lock the heat inside your rooms while allowing the masonry to breathe perfectly, completely eliminating the risk of condensation.
Depending on your property’s specific needs, we offer a full suite of breathable insulation services:
Insulating Lime Plasters & Renders (The Space-Saving Solution): When space is at a premium, thick rigid boards aren't always practical. Instead, we can apply insulating lime plasters internally and insulating lime renders externally. Because these are applied wet directly to the masonry, they take up far less room than board systems. Internally, this saves your valuable floor space. Externally, a slimmer render profile means we often don't have to alter your roofline, eaves, or window reveals. This method is incredibly thermally efficient—when applied at a thickness of 50mm, insulating lime can improve the U-value (the rate of heat loss) of a solid masonry wall by 50% to over 75%. It is also far less destructive, as it requires no heavy mechanical fixings drilled into your fragile walls.
Internal Wall Insulation (IWI): For maximum thermal performance internally, instead of building hollow, damp-trapping stud frames, we apply highly efficient wood fibre boards directly to your internal brick or stone. We then finish these boards with a seamless coat of traditional lime plaster. You get beautifully warm walls and a flawless decorative finish without losing nearly as much living space as you would with timber frames.
External Wall Insulation (EWI): If you want to massively upgrade your home's thermal efficiency without touching your interior decor, we can insulate from the outside. We apply breathable wood fibre boards directly to your exterior walls, finished with a protective lime render. This acts as a thermal blanket for the entire building, shedding rainwater while allowing the structure to breathe.
Breathable Roof Insulation: Up to 25% of your home's heat escapes straight through the roof. We install dense, breathable wood fibre insulation between and under your roof rafters. Unlike modern fibreglass, wood fibre is dense enough to keep your rooms toasty in the winter and stop them from overheating in the summer.
Draft-Free Floor Insulation: Cold feet and drafty floorboards can make your whole downstairs feel freezing. We lift and insulate suspended timber or solid floors using breathable wood fibre systems. This blocks the cold rising from the ground and stops the drafts, all while ensuring your floor joists can safely breathe to prevent rot.
Lower Your Bills, Protect Your Masonry
You don't have to choose between a warm house and a healthy house. By upgrading your period property with our breathable wood fibre and insulating lime systems, you protect your building's future while making it beautifully comfortable to live in today.