At HollandGreen, sustainability is not a separate strand of our work—it’s embedded into how we think, design and deliver. As part of our evolving approach to responsible design, we’ve been looking at the often-overlooked areas of practice that also have an environmental impact.
One of those is visualisation.
High-quality 3D renders are a vital tool in our design process. They help us communicate our vision clearly to clients and collaborators. But producing these visuals is surprisingly energy intensive. Each frame takes time and computing power to generate, and this work has traditionally been processed through centralised data centres—facilities that use enormous amounts of electricity, with a significant portion simply lost as waste heat.
To reduce the footprint of our render work, we’ve started working with Heata, a distributed computing platform that offers a more sustainable alternative. It’s a quiet shift in how we operate, but one that reflects our wider commitment to improving the impact of every stage of a project—from concept through to delivery.
Rather than relying on conventional data centres, Heata distributes its servers into people’s homes. These units carry out rendering tasks like those used in our visualisation work, and instead of allowing the heat generated to go to waste, it’s redirected to heat domestic water for the household. The process makes use of the energy twice—first to create the visuals, and again to provide hot water for free to the residents.
By routing our renders through this network, we’ve been able to make a measurable contribution. A recent visualisation project generated the equivalent of 3 tonnes of hot water, saving over 66kg of carbon compared to traditional approaches of cloud render farms, and providing more than 25 days’ worth of hot water for a household that might otherwise have been relying on carbon-intensive heating systems.
Importantly, this shift hasn’t changed how we work creatively or compromised quality. The process is managed securely, with full technical support, and allows our visualisation team to continue creating the high-quality visuals that underpin our design process—only now with a fraction of the environmental impact.
This is just one example of how we’re rethinking our internal processes as part of our wider sustainability agenda. We’re not just looking at the homes and gardens we create, but at how every layer of the studio operates—from the power used in digital tools to how we source materials and deliver on site.
Partnering with Heata is a step forward in our journey toward more responsible, low-carbon practice. It’s part of our belief that innovation doesn’t have to be large-scale to be meaningful—and that sustainability, to be authentic, must be woven into the day-to-day of how we work.
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