SEASIDE FEEL
The house is located 12 miles from the coast, so David and Deanna liked the idea of a New England-style cladded exterior
O LOW POINT
“When we ordered the triple-glazed windows and all the first-floor windows came back from the manufacturers 400 mm too small. The company took responsibility for the matter and replaced them all, but it set us back six months in the middle of the build.” – David Martin
september/october 2019
ne of the most intimidating aspects of buying a plot of land and building your own house is worrying that you won’t like it when the last piece of the jigsaw finally falls into place, and you move in. This wasn’t a problem for David and Deanna Martin, who now live in a striking self-build contemporary home in Emneth, near Wisbech, Norfolk.
Realising their dream to have a sustainable and stylish place to enjoy their retirement together started when they bought a 1,200 m2 plot of land next door to their existing home in 2004.
However, they took a number of years to carefully consider their first self-build project before embarking on it in earnest in August 2014, moving in February 2016. “Our previous house was a Georgian farmhouse,” explains former primary school teacher Deanna. “It was lovely, with lots of period features, but it was costing a lot to maintain and to keep warm.”
“And the floors creaked!” says David, who worked as an agricultural consultant and is a keen gardener. “One of the first things we noticed about our new house was that the floors didn’t creak at all.”
The Martins had found themselves spending more and more time living in the conservatory at the back of their house and began to imagine what it might be like to have a home which opened up directly at the back to a garden.
They also enjoyed the natural light the conservatory brought in, and this began to inform their ideas of how they might want a new home to look. Also, they wanted to embrace the flexibility of integrated open-plan living rather than working around a series of smallish, unconnected period-style rooms as they currently were doing.
“We were living in a house with 12 individual rooms and using just one or two,” says David. “Now we’re living in a house with six rooms and using all them all.”
Their new home has three bedrooms, plus a
“What we most definitely weren’t interested in was building a boring box. We were looking for perhaps what you might call a non-conventional architect”
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