HPH399: The Good Building Book – with Jon Broome and Nick Grant...

Jon Broome and Nick Grant explain why they have written The Good Building Book, what’s in it, who it will help and how best to put it all into practice.

Interview with Nick Grant and Jon Broome

Architect Jon Broome and engineer Nick Grant have years of design and construction experience between them, and have set out to share their knowledge of creating how to make buildings that work. Their book, The Good Building Book, is an attempt to cut through the greenwash and distil practical, hard-won lessons from decades of hands-on experience. Rather than producing an encyclopaedia of building, they chose to write from what they actually know — self-build, community projects, Passivhaus consultancy — and then explore how those insights ripple outward to anyone procuring or inhabiting buildings. The result is a book that asks uncomfortable questions about celebrated projects and invites readers to do the same.

“It was an idea of trying to distil the sense out of ‘greenery’ and come up with something practical and useful in how people design and build.” — Jon Broome

Finding examples of ‘great’ buildings is not as easy as you might think

The title The Good Building Book is deliberately modest. Jon and Nick suggest that it’s easy to improve buildings but difficult to create ‘great’ buildings that are universally loved. You can however deliver buildings that perform well, are cost effective and look beautiful. Sadly a lot of prize-winning architecture fails the people who have to live and work inside it. All too often buildings are treated like sculptures, which quickly eats into the budget.

Users deserve a seat at the table

One of the book’s recurring themes is that the people who will actually use a building are routinely excluded from the design process. Jon traces this to a cultural problem in the UK around trust — a reluctance to believe that ordinary people can make sensible decisions about the spaces they inhabit. On the continent, collaboration between professionals and building users is far more common. The book argues that involving users isn’t just democratic; it produces better outcomes, because residents understand their own needs in ways that no brief can fully capture.

“We must make sure that the users of buildings, the residents and so on, are respected and understood and that they have a role to play in the design and construction and management of buildings.” — Jon Broome

End users should upskill too

Nick is particularly keen that the book reaches not just architects and students but the people commissioning buildings. If end users understand a bit more about design process, and what commonly goes wrong, they are in a far stronger position to challenge what they’re being told or sold. The book aims to give people the tools and confidence to question their designers, select the right team, and push back against decisions that don’t serve them. For Nick, this is perhaps the most radical thing the book can do.

‘Best practice’ evolves over time

Both Jon and Nick have built their own homes, and neither pretends they got everything right. Jon’s house, built thirty years ago using massive timber construction, is relatively modestly insulated and very leaky by modern standards — he wishes he’d met Nick sooner to get a better handle on performance. Nick’s straw bale house was inspired by the Segal method, and Pat Borer and Cindy Harris’ book Out of the Woods, but over time he came to see that the material itself is only part of the overall picture and matters less than how you build. Both Nick and Jon are always learning and pour a lot of their first-hand experience into this book.

Nick’s self build home

Materials matter less than how you build

While Jon and Nick have a fondness for timber and bio-based materials, they say that material choice is only one part of it. What matters more is the process — how the building is designed, how it performs, whether it’s affordable and repeatable. Nick points out that a huge building full of bio-based materials that costs a fortune is not inherently sustainable. The book also encourages doing your own thinking and debunking. For example, building a house out of a really sustainable material like cork might seem like a good idea, but there’s actually a limited supply in the world and it would be extremely expensive.

A good building addresses function, economy and aesthetics

A central tool in the book is a Venn diagram drawn from the Vitruvian principles of firmitas, utilitas, venustas — but with economy added as an explicit third circle alongside function and aesthetics. Nick explains that too many award-winning buildings hit only the aesthetics circle: they look striking but don’t work well and are wildly expensive. The diagram isn’t prescriptive about what beauty looks like, since that’s subjective, but it insists that all three domains can be addressed.

Start with function, not form

One of the book’s strongest arguments is about where you begin the design process. If you start with a fixed idea of what a building should look like — a dramatic cantilever, a disappearing wall — then performance, cost, and buildability become problems you have to solve backwards. If instead you start with the functional layout, the budget, and the constraints, a form emerges that works. You can always add aesthetic flourish at the end, but it’s far harder to retrofit performance into a shape chosen for its visual impact alone. Vernacular architecture is a result of the process rather than a style — and that process starts with what the building needs to do.

Old Holloway, Juraj Mikurcik’s straw panel Passivhaus

Sufficiency trumps efficiency

When asked whether sufficiency matters more than efficiency Nick is clear: you can never do enough efficiency to compensate for simply having more and more of everything. He contrasts a vast Passivhaus mansion covered in solar panels with a modest, small building like Juraj Mikurcik’s self build home. The larger building may be highly efficient per square metre, but in absolute terms its environmental impact is far greater. Claiming that a huge, efficient building is environmentally friendly is, in Nick’s view, a problem. Sufficiency — building only what you need — is the foundation that efficiency builds on.

Slate House is an affordable Passivhaus

Genuine value engineering delivers better buildings

Nick draws a sharp distinction between real value engineering and what usually passes for it. True value engineering happens when a collaborative team — architect, structural engineer, fire engineer, quantity surveyor, M&E consultant — sits down together and solves problems creatively, often knocking significant cost off a building while improving its performance and buildability. Cost cutting, by contrast, is what happens when a project runs over budget and the nice stuff gets stripped out: wooden windows replaced with plastic, natural flooring swapped for PVC. The first approach bakes good decisions in from the start; the second is a desperate salvage job at the end.

Passivhaus is a tool that can deliver desirable outcomes

The book discusses Passivhaus openly, acknowledging that simply mentioning the word can alienate half an architecture audience. But Jon and Nick treat it as a practical tool to deliver outcomes we want. For detached new-build homes, they see it as close to a no-brainer — you get comfort, low energy bills, and a building that’s easy to live in. For small bungalows, the heating target can be a stretch, requiring very thick walls, and they suggest a slight relaxation of the target might make scaling up easier without meaningful penalty. For flats, the challenges shift to ventilation and hot water distribution rather than heat loss. The key point is that Passivhaus gives you tools for certain problems; for example it doesn’t tell you how to lay out a house or choose materials.

Beware innovation for innovation’s sake

Jon and Nick warn against the word “innovation” appearing in a brief. Genuine innovation emerges organically when you’re solving problems — and that’s welcome. But when innovation becomes a requirement, whether driven by planning policy or a BREEAM credit, it can disrupt the whole process. Walter Segal, Jon notes, believed that designers have a duty not to use their clients’ money for their own satisfaction and ego. The book encourages readers to focus on principles — comfort, affordability, low impact — rather than chasing the latest certification or buzzword.

RUSS is a members-led Community Land Trust

A Community Land Trust is a way to keep housing affordable in perpetuity

Jon’s involvement with the RUSS community build in Lewisham illustrates what becomes possible when people are trusted to organise themselves. The project began with workshops to establish shared principles, then evolved through a two-weekly cycle of group design discussions involving around fifty people selected by ballot. Some residents, such as Kareem Dayes, took on shell units and fitted them out themselves.

What’s special about a Community Land Trust is that it takes land out of the open market, so that it remains affordability going forwards. Jon sees ‘diversity of offer’ as essential to any comprehensive housing policy, because the market simply doesn’t supply what a lot of people want or need.

The space between buildings has an important role to play

One aspect that Jon mentions a couple of times is how we mustn’t overlook the space between buildings: it’s how we understand places, and it’s where community life happens. Too much focus on buildings as objects, rather than as part of an active process involving the people who use them, leads to places that may look good in photographs but don’t work as neighbourhoods.

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HPH401: Let’s build something

HPH399: The Good Building Book – with Jon Broome and Nick Grant…