We started Shade & Breeze because British homes were built for a climate that no longer exists, and most of the advice on offer still assumes it does.
Most of the housing stock in this country was designed around keeping heat in, not keeping it out. That made sense for a long time. It doesn’t any more. Summers are hotter and longer, heatwaves that used to be rare events now arrive most years, and very few homes were built with any way to cope.
We looked at how homes in Southern Europe have handled this for centuries — not with air conditioning, but with shade, reflectivity and airflow — and set out to bring that same layered thinking to British houses, working with the brick, the budgets and the building regulations we actually have.
We’re not tied to a single shutter manufacturer, a single fan brand, or a single heat pump installer. We assess a home first, then recommend whichever combination of passive and active measures actually solves the problem — sometimes that’s a bracket and a solar-powered blind, sometimes it’s a full ASHP fan coil retrofit, and quite often it’s a lot cheaper than people expect.
We treat cooling as a set of layers, in order:
Most homes we assess need less active cooling than the homeowner initially assumed, because nobody had shown them the first three layers yet.
Shade & Breeze is a small team of cooling advisors and installers who’d rather spend twenty minutes properly assessing a house than sell the biggest unit we can fit through the door. If that sounds like the kind of advice you want, get in touch.