A
s the founders of an internationally- renowned family business making roulette tables, octogenarians Bill and Barbara Cammegh are used to gambling on the wheel of fortune.
But when it came to building their ‘lifetime’ home, a rustic Passivhaus in the Kent countryside at Smarden, near Ashford, they left absolutely nothing to chance.
Halfpenny House, which takes its delightful name from a toll bridge over the River Thames in Lechlade, Oxfordshire where the couple share many fond memories, was custom-built – complete with a lift from the kitchen to the bedrooms – with Bill and Barbara’s future needs to the fore.
“We purchased the site with the planning consent already agreed,” says Bill. “But there were some tweaks we wanted to make as to how we would use the house so we worked with Richard [Hawkes, the architect] and his team to incorporate these changes. In particular, we wanted to reconfigure the utility room and back kitchen to suit us.”
Richard Hawkes, whose Kent-based architecture practice specialises almost entirely in this very particular type of rural build all over the UK, introduced the Cammeghs to a builder he trusted. He also put together the team for the project, which included a landscape architect to maximise the site, which started out as part of an old farmstead where chicken sheds and a silage clamp once stood. As well as having an overall picture of how Halfpenny House sat in the landscape, the team took painstaking care to what might appear to the casual observer to be insignificant details.
For example, Bill explains that Richard was very keen for the main barrel of the water-saving
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HIGH POINT
“Being in for Christmas! It was a close call but it made it all the more special. We moved in just in time to enjoy this time of year in the house, although we didn’t have much furniture at that point.” – Barbara Cammegh
system to not have rainwater pipes visible, so he cleverly hid them inside the columns which support the roof: “It meant getting the pipes in just the right place long before when the foundations were being done. This attention to detail certainly helps. Something like rainwater running off isn’t necessarily something you’d think too much about, but it’s been cleverly dealt with here.”
So did Bill and Barbara get hands-on and do any of the work themselves? “Oh no!” laughs Bill. “Our DIY days are over. We enjoy working in the garden, but we prefer to leave the hands-on stuff to the professionals.”
Their three-acre plot cost in the region of £400,000, and the build cost and landscaping came in at £800,000 and £100,000 respectively. The project had gained planning approval under the exacting standards of Paragraph 55 (now revised to Paragraph 79) legislation and was finished at Christmas 2016, having taken just nine months to build.
Although Halfpenny House is packed with innovative contemporary features such as a
november/december 2019
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