This year I am building a healthy home. We hope to be in by May, and I cannot wait. I cannot wait to be in an environment that is conducive to my health, rather than being detrimental or even just neutral. To just be in an environment that can improve my wellbeing is just slightly overwhelming, having been through five years of not being who I used to be.
My previous home had poisoned me. In 2017 I bought a refurbished duplex flat, on the second and third floor of a period townhouse in north London. Everything was new, all nicely painted. It was gorgeous. At the time, I was working full-time, going to the gym six times a week, very sociable — and completely unaware that there was a problem in my flat.
Where the hallway roof met the wall, there was a clear line of damp with very small mould spores. I thought nothing of it. I spoke to the builders who had done up the flat and said: “There’s clearly a leak. Can you please fix it?” But that required scaffolding. There were other priorities.
Then I started to get a bit run down. Again, I didn’t think too much of it. It was winter; it was cold. By summer, I had a terrible cough. I was out of breath going up and down the stairs, which was a shock considering I was previously in good shape. I had to stop going to the gym. I’d get through the working day and then be too tired to go out. My GP prescribed antibiotics, which didn’t work; then steroids, which seemed to aggravate the problem.
By November, I was working long hours for a film festival. I couldn’t breathe properly and had chest pains, so I called 111. They thought it sounded like a heart attack and sent an ambulance — I passed out on the way to hospital. Doctors still couldn’t work out what was wrong. It transpired that I had caught legionnaires’ disease, a severe form of pneumonia.
Advertisement
My body was in such a mess that I went to live with my parents. In the beginning of 2018, I moved back to my flat. The builders had fixed the leak and got rid of the mould. As I subsequently learnt, you can’t just put mould spray on and think it’s gone. Quite often, if there’s damp behind the walls, it’s a bigger problem.
It took two more years of struggling along, being able to work only part-time, before I found a health optimisation coach. Almost immediately, he suspected the root problem: the original mould that had been in my flat. He ran blood tests and other tests. It turned out I had very, very high levels of certain types of mould in my body which shouldn’t be there. Before all this, I had lived in the same place for ten years with no issues. There was no doubt that the problem came from my new home. I had breathed in the toxic air for a year before it was fixed.
The death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak [from prolonged mould exposure in 2020] broke my heart. I saw the pictures [of extreme mould in the Rochdale flat his family rented from a housing association]. The damage in my flat was nothing like that. It is terrifying to think what we put up with, whether it’s rented or owned property, and what damage we could be doing to our bodies.
If I hadn’t had toxic mould poisoning, I may not have caught legionnaires’ disease. My immune system was significantly weakened by the mould, which meant that I was more susceptible. Now I’m left with ME [myalgic encephalomyelitis], or chronic fatigue syndrome, as it’s known. My entire life has changed because of the damp and mould within my beautiful home.
● How to sell your home in winter
Advertisement
In 2020 I got married. Jason and I decided to move further out for space and fresh air. My two-bedroom flat had no garden and no balcony — especially difficult in lockdown. As I had respiratory problems, I was very conscious of not catching Covid. So we bought a 100-year-old, four-bedroom semi further out in north London. I walked in and was overwhelmed by the damp smells. But we could see it had real potential.
For me, it was the perfect start of my journey to building a healthy home. When we started lifting floorboards and knocking things around, we found an infestation of rot and mould. So we pulled the house down and are rebuilding from the ground, adding a new open-plan kitchen extension at the back, on a budget of £300,000.
I find it fascinating. The first thing was to fit a mechanical ventilation and heat recovery (MVHR) system: it expels moist air from your bathrooms and kitchen, extracts the heat and uses that to warm fresh air filtered from outside — then pumping this through your home.
People think I’m crazy when I say I can’t have MDF. It contains volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as formaldehyde, which are not good to breathe in. Finding a kitchen that won’t release these compounds took a lot of research — I’m using Kütchenhaus. For paint, I’ve been using the low-VOC brands Coat and Lick.
Some might argue that it’s better to have hardwood floors or tiles, but I love carpet. I am looking into different types of carpet — the backing can also have VOCs. Bamboo carpets are probably the healthiest, but they are so expensive. Perhaps if a hundred friends asked for a sample, I could stitch them all together.
Advertisement
● Why it’s so hard to predict house prices
Another big one is water quality. I’m putting in an Osmio whole-house water filtration system, an extra reverse osmosis filter for drinking water in the kitchen, and a Quooker tap for filtered boiling water. There’s a lot of hard wiring, so that we don’t have to rely on wi-fi and can limit electromagnetic fields. The lighting will dim when the sun sets, so that you’re working with your circadian rhythm. For now, I wear special glasses at night to stop the blue light from TV or computer screens from keeping me awake.
We spend over 90 per cent of our time indoors. There’s so much that we can do to make our homes healthier — it doesn’t just have to be when we’re renovating or building.
healthy-home.uk; for advice and inspiration, visit the Homebuilding and Renovating Show, in Farnborough on January 14-15. Get free tickets at homebuildingshow.co.uk/pr-thetimes
Interview by Martina Lees
