Sustainability & Regenerative Toursim

Gas heating

Gas heating is the biggest part of our carbon footprint. The good news: since gaining our Carbon Charter we have cut gas use by 4.17%. A house our size would typically use around 32,500 kWh a year; ours fell by 1,000 kWh to 23,000 kWh.

North Cottage is a Victorian building, and we can’t switch the heating off when it’s empty in winter. The whole house is kept at 12°C around the clock to stop damp. It’s a real energy eater, but essential. In winter 2025/26 we used an AI-modelled schedule that boosts the heating four times a day to hold 12°C, instead of running it constantly, and it has saved energy.

When guests are here in winter every room is its own heating zone, with a smart thermostat on every radiator. We installed the system in 2023 with help from an Airbnb sustainability grant, and followed it with a new, energy-efficient, future-proofed boiler in 2024. We can control heating and hot water remotely, to save energy and keep guests comfortable. Next year we’ll be trying for a further reduction.

Electricity

We used 2,018 kWh from June 2024 to June 2025, and our smart meter shows a slight dip to 2,000 kWh for June 2025 to June 2026. The real difference is that all of it now comes from Octopus’s renewable tariff, saving 420kg of CO₂, the equivalent of planting 210 trees. Switching to a renewable tariff was one of our Carbon Charter goals.

Ofgem classes six-bedroom houses as high-use homes, averaging 4,500 kWh a year, or around 2.5 kWh per occupant per day. Our guests averaged 2.61 kWh a day; adjusted by 15% for the empty winter periods, when some appliances still run, that falls to 2.22 kWh per guest night.

The reasons: LED lighting throughout, some on motion sensors; A-rated appliances; and in 2025 we replaced all our Miele vacuum cleaners with their newer energy-saving models. We do all our laundry on site, so our linen doesn’t travel, and we line-dry whenever the weather allows, so the tumble dryer sits idle. We’re also reducing laundry loads by encouraging guests to use fewer towels and to choose whether they want extra pillows. Over the next 12 months we’ll be watching all our energy data closely for further savings.

Norfolk is the driest county in England, with between 600mm and 780mm (24 to 31 inches) of rain a year, so we treat water as the scarce resource it is. In the last year we cut our water use by 18%.

Water-saving devices on the showers, fewer laundry loads and our water butts saved 28,000 litres, enough to fill all four of our 210-litre water butts 33 times over.

The Consumer Council for Water puts average domestic use at 140 litres per person per day. Our guests used 170 litres in 2025; take out the considerable amount we use for laundry and it falls to 159 litres. That is still above average, so we need to find a further 12%. It matters all the more in East Anglia, one of the most water-stressed regions in the UK, and it shows that luxury tourism and serious conservation can work hand in hand.

We send as little to landfill as we can. For the last two years we’ve given our surplus duvets to the Hillside Shire Horse Sanctuary near Cromer, for re-use as animal bedding (we wrote about it here), and we encourage guests to visit. Furniture we no longer need goes to the Sue Ryder charity shop in Cromer for resale. Sue Ryder is a national charity providing end-of-life and palliative care, and we’ve bought from the shop too, including our vintage bedside cabinets.

We ask guests to keep glass bottles separate, and we take them to a bottle bank that raises money for a nearby village.

We have been less successful with everyday recycling. Every recycling bin we’ve tried has been contaminated during every stay, and sorting mixed waste by hand on a busy changeover isn’t something we have the time to do, or a job either of us enjoys. For now we point guests to the recycling banks near the pier. All properties must have recycling and food-waste collections by March 2027, and we’ll be ready. We’re not alone in finding it hard: North Norfolk District Council has itself delayed compulsory food-waste collections until 2027.

Cleaning

We supervise and help with all the cleaning ourselves. Where we can we use natural products, such as soap, vinegar, salt and soda crystals, instead of branded chemicals, and we avoid unnecessary ones like fabric softener that can harm the environment. We buy in bulk to cut packaging, and we refill the washing-up liquid and soap containers.

The gardens do real work for sustainable and regenerative tourism, and we’ve loved creating them. In the summer of 2019, the year after we arrived, we turned a former chicken coop and compost heap into an exotic sensory garden, and we’ve watched it grow into the burst of energy it is today. Gardening is for the patient, and for the long term. None of these plants were here before us, and some we propagated ourselves, like the Fatsia japonica, the arum lilies and the Ophiopogon nigrescens. We’ve taken the same approach throughout the garden.

Native, seasonal, perennial and exotic planting brings in bees, butterflies and moths, and a wide variety of birds. We identify their songs and calls with the Merlin app: blackbirds, robins and blue tits, up to the occasional sparrowhawk, pheasant and peregrine. After dark, pipistrelle bats flit through the garden and along the drive, and we were delighted to find hedgehogs too, confirmed by Google Lens identifying their droppings on the lawn. The occasional muntjac deer hops over the wall. We hope they enjoyed our strawberries the last few years, because they got to them before we ever did.

We keep hard surfaces to a minimum in favour of grass, mulch and gravel, which let rain drain through instead of running off, and we’ve added planters to the slate-paved courtyard. We make our own compost (two more bins in 2025), propagate our own plants, and mulch every flower bed, which cuts both watering and weeding. Indoors, the Conservatory’s exotic houseplants are slowly colonising the rest of the house, bringing a sense of calm and keeping guests a little closer to nature.