The new eco homes whose design is as cool as their credentials
Jonathan Morrison meets British architects creating bespoke homes that are not only good to look at but are green too
I had a new client the other day who phoned up and told me only two things: the size he wanted in square feet and that it had to be energy efficient,” says Francis Terry, one of the country’s leading practitioners of traditional architecture. “Twenty years ago building sustainably was some sort of crazy, hippy idea. But now it’s on everyone’s conscience. It’s like a Tesla – people want something that’s green but that’s also a thing of beauty.”
At the classical end of the spectrum, practitioners such as Terry and Robert Adam are busy resurrecting the country house (and occasionally townhouse) in brick and stone, albeit with a few twists. One project that Terry is working on hides a mass of photovoltaic (PV) cells behind a parapet wall – and, he points out, Tesla is developing PV slates that will be indistinguishable from the customary Welsh ones, so even that will soon be unnecessary – while Adam, at a deliberately vague location in a patch of woodland in southern England, is constructing a substantial family home that can pass for late 17th century but has a carbon footprint in minus numbers. This will be achieved with an oak frame sourced from the woods that enclose it, bricks and tiles that will be quarried from local clay deposits (the resulting pit forming a picturesque lake) and insulation from hemp grown in a nearby field.
There will be a huge solar array to power it all, again hidden in a field, an ultra-efficient ground-source heat pump, which extracts warmth from the earth beneath, and an almost complete absence of concrete (cement production accounts for 7 per cent of global CO2 emissions alone), with the foundations settling deep into the earth, like those of genuine 17th-century palaces, thanks to some sweat-inducing calculations by the engineers.
The home, Adam says, “was all the client’s idea. It was their lifelong ambition to build something like this that is not only eco-friendly but will last two centuries at least. Hopefully it will prove that a house doesn’t have to look like a shipping container to be sustainable.”
Traditional materials can also lead to a more sympathetic response to unusual or precious landscapes, as the House at Camusdarach Sands in Orkney by Raw Architecture Workshop has demonstrated. Placed on a hillside in the remote north, it deploys angled black timber and grey stone so as not to jar with the surrounding landscape of peat, wild grass and stormy sky. As the designers point out, in 5,000 years of human occupation around here, the weather hasn’t improved much, but at least huge windows at the ends of the house’s gables now let in precious winter light.
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Fiona McLean of McLean Quinlan, which specialises in the sort of bespoke contemporary properties that delight photographers, agrees that clients are “very responsive” when she proposes a green design. “Trying to be carbon negative is more expensive, so we have to get them on board, but then they’re usually as enthusiastic as we are,” she says. “Often our clients are pretty sensitive people. Really, the only arguments we ever have are over whether it’s a good idea to have a heated pool.”
One advantage of utilising a more modernist style for her projects in the UK, North America and Switzerland, she says, is that “photovoltaic panels work better with flat roofs, where you can’t see them”, while triple-glazing, thorough insulation, rainwater harvesting for flushing toilets and ground or air-source heat pumps come as standard.
She also points out that the sort of clientele who dine solely on organic food are equally keen to utilise natural materials – and in particular wood. “They want to keep chemicals out,” she adds. “We might use natural clay plaster for the interior, for example, so it’s symbiotic.”
A good example is her house in the Chilterns, its floor-to-ceiling windows offering incredible views over neat gardens and the rolling green fields beyond. A limestone façade and walls covered in climbing plants give way to sumptuous wood-panelled rooms inside, while the roof is covered in heather and lavender – a delight for the bees. Enhancing, rather than disrupting, an area of natural beauty is key (and helps with planning permission).
The award-winning Hampshire House by Niall McLaughlin, which is set into the slope of a river valley and backs against a flint-clad “inhabitable wall”, also opens up to astounding vistas. These are created by a series of staggered pavilions in untreated oak and stone (which represent steps in the journey of life for multiple generations of the same family) arranged around a double-height courtyard kitchen. The house, as the Riba judges who honoured it in 2019 put it, not only “enhances the wellbeing of those inhabiting the space, but radiates tranquillity”.
Sarah Wigglesworth, who famously built her own house – Stock Orchard Street – largely out of straw bales on a scrap of land by the main line out of King’s Cross station in London, agrees that the future is biotic. “Straw bales are actually a really good thing to build with – we produce a lot and they aren’t eaten much by horses any more,” she says. “I’m excited by crop-based materials. We can create a rich and sensual and textured environment if we embrace them. Luxury to me means masses of space, double-height ceilings, gardens for connecting with nature. Yes, it’s about what a client wants, but it’s also about new products and new thinking.”
The elephant in the pine-panelled room, though, is longevity: it is obviously more wasteful to rebuild a house every 50 years than to create something that lasts generations. For Francis Terry, the son of King Charles III’s favourite architect, Quinlan,who worked extensively for the Crown estate and Duchy of Cornwall, that means the primary requirement is beauty.
“People hang on to what they find beautiful, not what looks dated,” he says. “And what is sustainable is often beautiful, and may become more beautiful in the mind, like a distant vista of wind turbines out at sea. But no matter how wealthy you are, we could all do with a little help saving money on the gas bill. So designing sustainably is not just ethical, it’s economic too.”
