How green is my architect? - 29/07/07
You may not have heard of Michaelis Boyd Partners, but I can tell you that they are almost certainly the most fashionable architects in Notting Hill, which makes them the most fashionable architects in the world.

And they are green, greener than the very greenest thing you can think of, or so they say. They ‘did’ David Cameron’s new house in Notting Hill on the Kelfield Estate, including his rooftop windmill. Sadly, due to planning permission problems, it is now cluttering up his garage, no doubt next to some unused exercise machines.

Alex Michaelis and Tim Boyd are the chaps behind this very successful and undoubtedly very lucrative business. Alex lives in an eco-house on a plot (said to have cost him £750,000) just off the corner of Oxford gardens and St Marks Road, in case you fancy going for a gander. As he could only get permission to build to a height of 1.8 metres, all you’ll see is a low wall and the grass roof, which looked comprehensively dead last time I looked. You won’t be able to see the £10,000 water borehole or the swimming pool in the basement.

Though they sell themselves as green architects now, in fact they’ve made their considerable fortunes from taking the stuccoed mansions of the money-drenched southern bit off Notting Hill and gutting their interiors. I mean really gutting, so that all that is left is the shell of the original building, and rebuilding the interior in ultra-chic modernist style. Why you would want to buy a perfectly good Victorian house and then pretend that you’re living in a minimalist palace is completely beyond me.

Typical though, isn’t it. Make your millions out of the unbelievably wasteful destruction of perfectly good houses, then turn green.

Apart from their morbid pessimism, their instinctive authoritarianism and their neurotic misanthropy, I really have nothing against the greens. I just wish they would stop telling me how to live.

When I wrote a piece about the fact that there is nothing, in resource-use terms, to choose between disposable nappies and reusable ones – look here to read the full argument – I attracted as much as one piece of crank mail. It came from the delightful Angie. Here (uncorrected) is her witty and trenchant email.

“Your a complete fuckwit!
the UK environment agency has withdrawn their report on disposable nappies in order to do a proper report that takes in entire lifecycle analysis, you need to get your facts right.
you sound like a right yuppie wanker.... did you remember to get some fake mud to spray on your 4WD???”

Since I had partly based my piece on the report Angie mentions, I did check with the Environment Agency. They replied ‘We stand by the results as being representative of the position in the UK in 2002-3. However, we have agreed… to update the study to the main nappies in use in 2006.’ And now the government has announced it’ll fund no more campaigns to persuade people to change over to real nappies.

On the spray-on mud front though, Angie did have something new to teach me. I was astonished to learn that this product does exist – unless this is one of the best satirical websites I’ve ever seen. I’ll leave it to Angie to comment on whether it would add authenticity to the Fiat Cinquecento my family owns, a car so tiny we could only lower its emissions by replacing the engine with pedals.

And I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether the true purpose of this ingenious product (a snip at £7.95 for a 75 cl bottle) is to hide car number plates from the prying lenses of speed and congestion zone cameras.

I came face to face with the best argument against the greens in 1980, when their baleful movement was just getting off the ground. In the Sudan, I asked a friend if it wasn’t a good idea for his country to be more careful with its environment. At the time, we were sitting in his mother’s house which enjoyed neither running water nor electricity. His answer? ‘You in the West can never stop us from getting what you have.’

PS – If you’d like to give Angie a few pointers on grammar and punctuation, drop her a line at banksiabunny@yahoo.com