The starting statement
Nature is in crisis. The human footprint is out of control, and humans will suffer from it.
Many solutions already exist that would improve both our resilience (our ability to keep living well when systems around us fail or degrade) and our sustainability (the size of the footprint we leave behind). The bottleneck is not invention. The bottleneck is adoption:
- Very few people know what to do, how to do it, or where to start to improve their habitat and their housing habits.
- Very few entrepreneurs are pushing these solutions. The trades and the supply chain default to old habits, because old habits are what they know how to sell, install and invoice.
Our mission
Make innovative, sustainable and resilient solutions for human habitat available to everyone, easily.
“Easily” is the operative word. A solution that exists but requires the homeowner to become an expert, find a willing installer, and absorb all the risk is not, in practice, available.
Our approach
We work on the whole chain, not one link of it:
- Know — develop genuine, in-depth knowledge of the problem domains, the pains people actually have, and the solutions that actually work.
- Prove — apply a scientific approach with measurable impact. Measure the starting point, establish that there is a real need, state the expected result, implement, then measure the actual result. See Evidence protocol.
- Share — publish what we learn, including what does not work.
- Do — engineer and implement solutions, both as one-shot projects and as ongoing services.
Knowledge is the asset. Everything else is a way of putting that asset to work.
Theory of change
If sustainable and resilient habitat solutions are made legible (people understand what applies to them), proven (impact is measured, not claimed), and easy to buy (someone competent will actually do it), then adoption stops being an act of conviction and becomes an ordinary decision.
That is the change we are trying to cause. Every activity we take on should be traceable back to it.
Why us, why here, why now
We (Nico and Laure) live with our family in a finca in Mallorca. We are embedded in a community of families in comparable situations — expats with fincas, with real problems and with budget allocated to house projects.
This gives us three things that are hard to buy:
- A live testbed. Our own finca is Site Zero: we can instrument it, intervene on it, and measure honestly, because we bear the consequences.
- Direct access to the problem. We are not researching a market from outside; we are in it, with neighbours who will tell us the truth about what hurts.
- A short path from knowledge to implementation. What we learn can be tried on a real site within a season, not within a funding cycle.
What this is not
- Not a single-product company. The product is competence; the form it takes is open.
- Not advocacy detached from evidence. If we cannot measure it, we say so.
- Not limited, in the long run, to Mallorca or to fincas. That is where we start because that is where we have leverage — see Scope.