helping heritage homeowners start their complex renovation projects
Estonia has over 12,000 protected heritage buildings. It also has significant ambition and funding behind renovating them — the BuildEST programme is rewriting the country's long-term renovation strategy for all existing buildings toward 2050, with a total budget of €16.3 million; the LIFE Heritage Home project, running from 2023 to 2026 with €1.5 million, is developing a user-specific toolkit for deep energy renovations of heritage homes.
the problem
The ambition is real. The homeowner-facing experience of that ambition is not.
We were briefed, as part of a collaboration between EKA's IxD.ma programme and the Estonian Climate Ministry, to approach the entities and homeowners of Estonian heritage homes and facilitate access to the procedures and information they need to renovate houses that — given their protected status — come with rigid norms on what can and cannot be altered.
the process
- research
The research phase was a team effort. We began by mapping the terrain. Estonia's heritage renovation space is layered — from individuals and neighbourhoods up through industries, local municipalities, the national government and the European Union — and each layer contributes rules, funding, or friction to the same process.
Programmes like BuildEST and LIFE Heritage Home carry real intent and real money (€9.5M of BuildEST's budget is a European grant), but on the homeowner side, that ambition lands as fragmented PDFs, inconsistent guidance, and an approval process that bends under its own weight.
Public opinion wasn't helping. Construction in Estonia carries an added tax of 30–40%, and Tallinners we spoke to and read about tend to treat homes through the lens of investment rather than long-term dwelling — many don't see the logic in deep-energy renovations if a house isn't going to be resold. That mindset works against both the climate goals and the comfort of the people who actually do want to live in their homes.
- positioning
From the interviews, the perspective of the unaware homeowner took shape, that of someone who doesn't know what they don't know, and the one the system most reliably loses.
“We wrote to the city government to get everything approved, but it turned out to be a bureaucratic nightmare: if you change one thing, you have to reapprove all the engineering systems — heating, ventilation, water, electricity… In the end we gave up — we are doing it without permits.”
Unaware homeowners don't need more information — they're already drowning in it, in forms, PDFs, permit categories, and construction vocabulary. They need less of the wrong kind and more of the right kind, shaped around what they actually care about.
The question consolidated itself as:
How might we push unaware heritage homeowners to discover, learn and take action on their heritage home's energy efficiency, without overwhelming them?
the solution
The solution phase was an individual effort. The last part of that last question did most of the work. Unaware homeowners don't need more information — they're already drowning in it, in forms, PDFs, permit categories, and construction vocabulary. They need less of the wrong kind and more of the right kind, shaped around what they actually care about.
The answer became My Home Renovation Check — a starter-plan generator that sits at the front door of the homeowner's renovation journey, before commitment, before cost, before bureaucracy.
The core design move was reframing. The existing landscape treats energy efficiency as a technical problem: construction materials, how to work them, who can work them, how much things cost, how to finance them. Each of those is a legitimate question, but none of them is what actually pulls an unaware homeowner into action. What pulls them is what the renovation will do for their life — more comfort, a more valuable home, lower bills, and a sense that what they're doing aligns with their values around sustainability. The tool leads with those, and threads the technical answers through them instead of the other way around.
The result is a Renovation Report, covering priorities, possible limitations, potential environmental impact, funding options, creating an overall starter plan for the homeowner. Each renovation that is found as a priority is tagged with a cost tier, a heritage-compliance label (“Heritage Safe” or “Permit May Be Required”), an estimated cost range, expected yearly savings, and yearly CO₂ reduction. Each also carries a short “Why this helps” rationale and a heritage note explaining what the protection status means for this particular action.
conclusions
The measure of this redesign isn't whether it teaches homeowners everything about heritage renovation. It's whether it removes the moment where people decide the process isn't worth it.
Unaware homeowners don't give up because they don't care — they give up because the first honest look at what they're being asked to do tells them they're not equipped, and nothing in the current system contradicts that. My Home Renovation Check is an attempt to contradict it, early, and in their own terms.
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