study, garage, downstairs bathroom and an open-plan living/dining/kitchen area. On the first floor, reached by a hand-built oak and stainless steel open-tread staircase, there is a library area, created by cantilevering the landing in a gallery style. It is highlighted by a stunning glass pendant light-fitting which makes a huge impact hanging over the hallway and stairs. The stylish simplicity of modular homes such as Huf-Haus attracted David and Deanna, not least because they are easy to maintain externally. And because Wisbech is just 12 miles from the sea (The Wash nature reserve), they liked the idea of a New England-style cladded exterior.
Both their visual and practical ambitions have been achieved using long-lasting, low- maintenance render and HardiePlank fibre cement cladding, along with a zinc-clad aluminium roof and aluminium windows with an internal timber face.
“What we most definitely weren’t interested in was building a boring box,” says David. He adds: “We were looking for perhaps what you might call a non-conventional architect, someone who would understand and interpret what we were thinking of.”
Luckily, they didn’t have to look far. Russell Swann, of Wisbech-based Swann Edwards Architecture, lives in the neighbouring village, in a sustainable home with a strong contemporary thread. They invited him for a meeting and
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www.sbhonline.co.uk
discovered that his ideas chimed with their own. “The back of the house is all glass,” says Deanna. “And the front is quite imposing as you come down the road. A lot of people who know me locally couldn’t believe that I wanted to live in an house like this, but over the years we have lived in all kinds of houses including a bungalow and our Georgian one, so the idea of having a contemporary-style house didn’t faze me at all – in fact it was really exciting.”
“Thermal performance was always one of my criteria,” adds David. “We were spending around £3,000 per annum on energy bills in the old place. One of my targets was to slash that cost, especially because as we get older, incomes become pretty fixed.”
To achieve this crucial aim, Russell brought together both ‘passive’ and ‘active’ design strategies to design a house with carbon neutrality and sustainability to the fore. This meant manipulating the site’s particular characteristics and climatic conditions to optimise the building design and combining this approach with efficient M&E (monitoring and engineering) systems and renewable technologies.
“By making the building the right shape with carefully-placed windows, entries, exits and rooms, we were able to reduce its energy consumption by 30 to 40 per cent,” he says. Underpinning this strategy is a clever exploitation of the building’s orientation. The
september/october 2019
DECOR
Deanna describes the interior décor scheme as “contemporary classic”
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