ECO DEVELOPMENT FOCUS
Development Focus: Pippin’s Old Apple Store
For our sustainable building supplement, we take a look at Pippin Properties’ Old Apple Store development in conjunction with Ecos Homes
Sustainable building used to be perceived as fringe. With a limited appeal to the general population, sustainable buildings have been slow on the uptake in the UK. With a need for educating the industry about the subject and real life examples of how sustainable buildings can be built in mainstream building, the charity Ecos Trust was set up in the year 2000 to help drive demand.
development company Ecos Homes and through this a number of high quality sustainable buildings were constructed to be used as an educational aid to the industry and also to be sold on the open market. The Old Apple Store is one such development – a small pioneering development of five houses in Somerset. Built to the Code for Sustainable Homes Level 5 with zero carbon emissions, it was the first of its kind available on the open market.
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THE VISION: The Old Apple Store was planned to be a sustainable housing
o build real life examples to add clout to these claims, the charity set up the
development in the South West that used an advanced approach to design, materials, systems and planning, and was aimed to demonstrate the fact that building sustainably is commercially viable. The houses at the Old Apple Store were planned to blend both traditional and contemporary design to offer homes that were energy efficient, healthy and comfortable to live in and to demonstrate that good quality, highly sustainable homes can be sold on the open market and are economically viable.
THE SITE: The Old Apple Store occupies a brownfield site that was previously used for sorting and storing apples. The site has since become untouched and has been sitting unused. Pippin and Ecos thought the area was perfect for redevelopment.
CONSULTATION: Support for the project was found to be wide for the project in the local area as the dilapidated buildings of the Old Apple Store were seen to be an eyesore. The local council were even more impressed when they heard the completed build was to be zero
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carbon, and were therefore very excited and willing to let the development take place.
CONSTRUCTION: The houses were built to blend both traditional and contemporary design to offer homes that are energy efficient, healthy and comfortable to live in. The timber frames and all
other timber used in the construction is FSC certified, with a small amount of structural grade timber being PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement
of Forest Certification) when FSC wasn’t available. The floors at ground level are fully insulated dense concrete slabs and the walls below the DPM layer are also insulated with blown polystyrene to prevent cold bridging at this level. The walls of the houses are an
open panel system with timber frame cassettes. Once they were erected on site they were ‘wrapped’ externally with 100mm wood fibre insulation board and internally with 11mm oriented strand board, which had been
House five during construction
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