M
aking the decision to move out of London turned out to be the easy part for strategy consultant Paul, and his beauty therapist wife Sarka. There followed a long and fruitless search of the surrounding suburbs for a new-build home within easy commuting distance, but after visiting each property they were left bitterly disappointed, and everywhere the problem was the same. “My late father was an old-fashioned joiner, and I was brought up on building sites,” explains Paul. “I have certain standards, coming from that. Once the developer had shown us the glitzy parts of the house, I’d go and open the airing cupboard and stick my head in the loft. Frankly, it was the poor build quality that meant we didn’t find anything we liked,” he says.
But their luck changed when they were due to view an unfinished Huf Haus project – and were waiting for an estate agent who was running late. “We took that time to wander around the site, and I was immediately struck by the quality of build – the fact that this house, that was made largely of wooden beams, was just so well put together. Then when we went inside, we loved the open nature of the environment, and the fact that there was so much light, as most of the walls were glass.”
It was a decisive moment and a turning point for the couple. Paul and Sarka then contacted Huf Haus who explained their design and build process – now the hunt was on to find a plot, or a property that they could knock down.
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“One of the things that impressed me about Huf was that they thought about planning issues and problems getting planning permission, so they hired a planning advisor to help us,” says Paul. “We’d send him information on a plot or a house, and he’d look up the local planning guidance and give us a rating – easy, middling or difficult – on whether we were likely to get planning permission to build a Huf house there. That was fantastic.” The advisor was so efficient that once an old
Surrey property that fitted the bill had been found and purchased, planning permission went through first time round, and then the couple travelled to the Huf village in Hartenfels, Germany, to settle on the design of their new home. “It’s a very well-planned journey,” explains Paul. With his dad having been a builder, he was able to present a design to the company that they then refined. “You spend two days in the village looking at the different examples of what they can do, and you really work through every detail.” He’s keen to stress that while there is a broad selection of designs that you can select from as the basis for your choice – theirs is the Bauhaus- inspired Huf Art 5 – the Huf approach is far from ‘cookie cutter,’ and is actually highly personalised. Working closely with Peter Huf, the company’s chief architect in the UK, Paul and Sarka were able to come up with plans for their home that ticked all the boxes on their wish list. With another two days spent in the village in
LOW POINT
One of our neighbours tried to stop the build with a legal challenge. The main basis for their complaint was loss of privacy, but because we had rotated the orientation compared to the previous house, none of our windows faced their property.
issue 01 2021
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