New Sustainable House

The new house is a traditional four bedroom farm house designed by Native Chartered Architects of York to respect its rural position in an East Riding village. It has a high specification of renewable energy sources designed to minimise its impact on the environment.

The house is built to meet a high level of sustainability on a voluntary basis as the current owners wish to minimise their carbon footprint and live in a comfortable and sustainable home for the foreseeable future.

The design of the replacement dwelling is timber framed clad in brick with a slated pitch roof and sash style windows under brick and stone curved lintels. A double garage with storage over adjoins the log store to supply wood burners in the house.
Internally the construction of the house walls is sprayed with hemp mixed with lime on to the timber frame. This gives the house high thermal mass, insulation properties and minimises the use of carbon during construction. The hemp was sourced locally in the East Riding to further reduce the embodied carbon of the materials.

Also on the site is a timber summer-house and greenhouse sited on the northern part of the garden close to the vegetable garden. Due to the rural character of the eastern part of the garden, this will be cultivated with fruit trees and vegetables and not made into a formal garden.

In addition to the high thermal performance of the fabric of the house, including triple glazed windows, a substantial scheme of low carbon technology allows the house to be carbon negative. There are solar thermal hot water sited on the rear slopes of the roof. The main heating requirement is sourced from a ground source heat pump controlled from the plantroom. East of the garage block, facing south, an array of Photovoltaic panels on ground mounted frames generate electricity for the house.

The house is connected to a sewage package treatment plant on site and not connected to any mains drainage. Any building materials arising from the demolition of the original house on the site were either re-cycled or re-used for boundary wall treatments where appropriate.