Bear’s Reach is our first completed house at Graven Hill in Oxfordshire. The clients commissioned the house for themselves and their two small children, with a focus on flexibility and the ability to adapt over time to accommodate the family’s changing needs, all the way to potentially becoming a multi-generational home with scope for accessible living.
This new low-energy house embraces the east/west orientation and uses the changing light to define spaces and enrich the day-to-day use of the house. Elevating the main sitting room to first floor provides a perfect view of the nearby wooded hill.
A richly textured water-struck brick gives life to the simple sculptural form of the building, and a timber clad undercroft softens and highlights the entrance area. Nestled into the foot of Graven Hill, the hard lines of the brick rise out of the naturalistic planting which grows right up to the house.
With high performance triple glazed windows, extremely high levels of insulation, mechanical ventilation and heat recovery, energy consumption has been kept to a minimum.
Photography: Ed Aves
In collaboration with: Charlie Luxton Design
Landscape Design: Rory Andrews Landscape Design
Heating and Ventilation: Energy My Way
Solar: Aspey Energy
Timber Frame: MBC Timber Frame
Heycroft is the renovation of a very tired seventies terrace house in the heart of a historic village, which had stood empty and the garden neglected for several years.
The project embraces the period and puts a contemporary touch on the 70’s fabric; reimagining the layout of the house and converting it into a space suitable for modern living.
The project includes a new kitchen made out of reclaimed oak floorboards. The handmade units were designed and built by us in response to a love of natural materials and ambition to pair the rustic and contemporary. Heycroft is an example of a transformative design with a focus on recycled/reused materials and a lower budget, giving a new lease of life to this housing type which accounts for a large percentage of the nation’s existing housing stock.
Photography by Ed RS Aves
A detached sixties house surrounded by woodland on the edge of Oxford, Bagley Wood was an ugly duckling with huge potential.
Working with the existing fabric as far as possible to minimise the amount of construction and waste, the design utilises existing openings of the original house, altering sizes and proportions, before over-cladding with a layer of insulation and combination of European Larch and Cedar Shingles, transforming its appearance. The new extension, housing a kitchen/living space and master bedroom, shares the material palette and opens up a previously unexplored relationship between the living spaces and the adjacent woodland. Floor to ceiling glazing in the new kitchen brings the woods into everyday life.
This project began life at Charlie Luxton Design.
Photography by Ed RS Aves
Fairacre is a new sustainable house on the edge of the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire.
The design is part of a wider landscape plan and has been developed to work with the different functions of the gardens. The spaces within the house also respond to the fantastic views in ways that give the rooms different characters, ensuring there is interest and variety throughout the house. The material palette takes its cues from the dry stones wall on and around the site, its rural location, and position on a wooded valley outside of the village.
After careful analysis of the existing dwelling it was decided to replace it with a much higher performing building constructed from natural materials. The new house has passivhaus levels of insulation and airtightness combined with extremely low embodied energy.
Woodkeepers is a pair of timber-framed barns on the top of a Cotswold valley benefitting from amazing views. One barn has long since been converted into two holiday cottages and the adjoining open sided barn has never been converted.
We have converted the pair into a single dwelling with an emphasis on a contemporary sensitive design while also celebrating the site’s agricultural aesthetic. Most fo the existing fabric is retained. The internal spaces are open and light and, although modern, have more in common with the original barn than the previous conversion which cluttered the space with internal walls. The previous conversion featured overly domestic doors and glazing, whereas the new scheme uses modern systems to provide a sense of barn openings rather than traditional house windows.
The technical approach is based around natural materials including wood fibre insulation and lime plaster, keeping the environmental impact to a minimum and allowing the building to breath. An air source heat pump provides energy in the place of the previous oil fired boiler.
Hurstmead is a new low-energy dwelling for members of a multi-generational farming family, providing a long term home for them within reach of the farm.
The site occupies land that has been cut off from the farm by the construction of a new road. Subsequently the field has been commercially non-viable to farm and is naturally associated with the collection of other properties nearby.
The principal concept of the design is to create a walled garden with single storey building, inspired by nearby agricultural barns.
The building is split into two elements; the main brick clad living space sitting behind the ‘garden wall’ with a flat roof planted with a bio-diverse intensive green roof, and the bedroom barn with a pitched roof and timber clad walls.
The two are connected via a small glass link which helps to delineate the two and break down the overall building volume on the site.
Currently on site.
Stable House is a new three bedroom house, replacing a redundant stable block on the edge of a village in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds.
Roughly following the footprint of the stables and resident caravan, the building is divided into a collection of three ‘sheds’. Partly to breakdown the overall mass of built form while also providing easy phasing of the build, allowing work to progress at a manageable rate as budget allows.
Material choices are driven by the need to be self-build friendly as well as to reflect the agricultural nature of the site and edge of settlement location.
As with all of our new build projects, Stable House combines a fabric-first approach with natural materials in an attempt to minimise the impact of construction and ensure a low energy demand in occupation. The building incorporates a highly insulated timber frame and triple glazed composite windows, coupled with an air-source heat pump and mechanical ventilation and heat recovery (MVHR) system.
Status: Onsite, due for completion winter 2023.