Snug

A Cosy Movie Theatre or 3rd Bedroom?

The Snug was and is never going to be a huge room – hence the name. However taking out the chimney breast was a great move and has really made a big difference to how the space feels. We will be uploading images as soon as we empty it of DIY bits and bobs! Longer term we may make this into a downstairs bedroom or install one of the cool solutions we covered in this blog post. The room is so near the wetroom its virtually an en suite.

For now though we want to use it for movies and potentially home office, though that depends on how we rig the screen up.

Eco Products Fitted

The below list shows you the key companies whose products we fitted in this room and why they were selected.

Sustainable Laminate Floor

Quick Step make the laminate floor that we specified for the ground floor of our house. The wood that is used for face layer is sourced from controlled or ecologically certified forests. The middle layer, is made from HDF or wood that is sourced from Hevea (i.e. rubber wood) plantations these trees are only logged when they have stopped producing latex.

Ventilation & Heat Recovery

Vent-Axia supplied our mechanical ventilation and heat recovery system (MVHR), the model installed (Sentinel Plus B 443028) should retain up to 92% of the temperature differential of out going air. This should really reduce heating bills in the winter – no need to have windows open!

Power Ethernet Sockets

Mainline Power make an innovative power track solution which we planned to install within the zen room, in the end we changed the layout and it no longer fitted. We did however also fit the power ethernet sockets that mainline offer. These allow you to create a wired network that achieves a gross speed of up to 200Mbps

Multi-room Wireless Music

Because we plan to keep television to a minimum in our everyday live (we watch more movies) we decided to specify a TV speaker system that can also double a multi-room audio system which is why we selected the Sonos PLAYBAR. This means we don’t have duplicate products. We also get the bonus that the PLAYBAR amplifier switches itself off when the soundbar switches to low power mode.

Multi-room Wireless Thermostats

We have installed Heatmiser touchscreen thermostats throughout the eco house, each controls a specific rooms underfloor heating and forms part of network that can be controlled via smartphone. The snug a PRT-NTS sits next to the light switch on the wall.

Underfloor Heating

Underfloor heating made a lot of sense for us to install as no radiators existed in the house when we moved in. Additionally there was no insulation under the floor boards – so they needed to come up anyway. The National Energy Foundation quotes that up to 10% of heat can be lost through a houses floor, it felt like last winter (2012). We chose Timo Leon as they offer an open system that works with other companies products – in our case Timo Leon. There customer service has also been fantastic, shipping parts next day.

Eco Wall Paint

We chose Mylands paint because it is eco friendly and has the highest opacity on the market, the colour that we selected for the Snug was called The Boltons, a lovely light grey, which works nicely with Fitzrovia which we have used throughout the rest of the ground floor. It highlight this room as being more intimate.