If you want to make your home as green as possible, received wisdom says that you’ll find the job easier and the results more effective if you live in a well-insulated, draught-free modern house. But what if you don’t? What if you live, as so many of us do, in a characterful pile of a building with its own eccentricities and a personalised collection of draughts? What if your home is architecturally significant, or even a nationally important, protected building? How feasible is it to combine the latest eco-friendly features with architecture dating back hundreds of years?

That was the challenge Barry Morgan set himself when he bought dilapidated Grade II-listed stables in Kent, south-east England – the only significant structures remaining of the grand Palladian estate of Foots Cray Place, which was built in the mid-18th century and destroyed by fire in 1949.