Pest control is usually treated as a facilities problem: something that happens to a building years after the design team has moved on. But for one of the UK’s fastest-growing infestation risks, the die is largely cast at specification stage. Clothes moth and carpet moth numbers have climbed steadily for over a decade, with heritage bodies recording some of the highest levels since monitoring began. The insects’ success is, in an uncomfortable way, a design story. Modern buildings, warm year-round, well sealed, generously carpeted and full of quiet voids, are close to ideal moth habitat. And the difference between a building that suffers recurring infestations and one that never does often comes down to decisions made in the spec, the fit-out and the handover. Here’s what the design and construction side should know about a pest the industry rarely thinks about. Why modern buildings suit moths so well The species doing the damage, the common clothes moth and the case-bearing carpet moth, need three things: keratin-based fibres to feed their larvae, warmth to breed, and undisturbed darkness to do it in. Contemporary buildings deliver all three: None of this argues against warm, well-sealed, wool-carpeted buildings. It argues for knowing the tenant you’re designing in alongside the ones you’re designing for. The specification decisions that matter A handful of choices at design and fit-out stage largely determine a building’s moth exposure. The construction-phase risk nobody briefs Refurbishment projects carry a specific and underappreciated moth risk: disturbance and inheritance. Stripping out an older building with a historic infestation scatters larvae and eggs precisely when dust, temporary works and stored materials make monitoring impossible. Retained carpets, stored furniture and soft strip-out arisings can reseed a finished scheme. And furnished show flats, hotel FF&E and staged interiors routinely import natural-fibre goods that have sat in warehouses for months. The mitigations are cheap and procedural: That last point deserves emphasis on handover. An infestation surfacing during the defects liability period, in a hotel, BTR block or high-end residential scheme, becomes an argument about origin that nobody can win cleanly. Dated monitoring records from practical completion onward settle it before it starts. When a building already has them For completed buildings, the response discipline matters as much as the design, because moth biology punishes half-measures. Eggs, larvae, pupae and adults are present simultaneously; surface treatment kills the visible generation while the next matures in the voids, and the infestation returns on a six-week schedule that gets misread as reinfestation rather than incomplete treatment. Established problems in occupied buildings justify bringing in moth control professionals at the survey stage rather than after a failed in-house attempt, particularly in London’s period conversions and dense residential stock, where infestations travel between units through shared voids and the true extent is reliably larger than the visible damage. A proper survey maps the spread before anyone commits to a treatment plan, and options now include whole-room heat treatment, which eliminates every life stage in one chemical-free session, a meaningful advantage in occupied residential and hospitality settings. Where the infestation centres on textiles and storage, or has already survived one round of treatment, specialist treatment for moth infestations is the higher-percentage call than a generalist contract. Single-pest specialists succeed on exactly the details that building-level treatments miss: species identification, treatment of stored textiles and concealed harbourages, and follow-up visits timed to intercept eggs that survived the first pass. For managing agents, the specialist’s documentation also feeds directly into service-charge justification and dilapidations files. A small line in the spec, a large line in the accounts The financial asymmetry is what makes this worth a design-stage conversation. The preventive measures, fibre choices, edge details, storage ventilation, monitoring traps through handover, cost between nothing and trivial. The failure modes are not trivial: wool carpet replacement at £30 to £60 per square metre across a floorplate, recurring treatment cycles in multi-unit buildings, FF&E write-offs in hospitality, and defects-period disputes with no clean answer. Moths will keep thriving in the buildings Britain now constructs; the warmth and the wool aren’t going anywhere. Whether they thrive in your buildings is, to a surprising degree, a specification decision. Design the harbourage out, monitor through handover, and escalate properly on first evidence, and the industry’s least-discussed pest stays that way.