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Do you feel that where you live is home?

 

Is the building you live in good for you?

 

Is the building you live in good for the environment?

 

Is your home warm in the winter and not too hot in the summer?

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Is your home well built and easy to maintain?

 

Are you delighted by your home?

 

We spend a lot of time in our homes. They provide shelter, security, warmth in the winter. They are a place where are lives change and evolve. 

 

Building your own home provides a unique opportunity to answer all these questions and the experience will be a mix of delight and high stress. The end result will be your home. 

 

Richard Clayson moved from London, in 2015 to East Sussex. The move was the result of a desire to leave London and a very long desire to build his own house. The dilapidated barn buildings were found by accident. They are two connected cow sheds and a large hay barn. The buildings are intriguing because of the care and detail of the construction. One of the cow sheds has very carefully built flint walls. The oak beams in the main barn provide a sense of the history of the building. 

 

Richard Clayson is a Chartered Surveyor and a Passivhaus Consultant. The house has won the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors award as being the best residential building in the South East in 2018. The judges said

 

“The barn is accessed down a farm track in the middle of the Sussex countryside, which belies the modernity of the refurbishment. The building is a stunning barn conversion to Passivhaus standards using the “EnerPhit” certification, only the seventh registered in the UK. The original hay barn is almost unaltered externally and the attached byres modestly clad and enclosed; but has a high build quality and sustainability, using high levels of insulation, air source heat pumps and triple glazing. A very carefully designed efficient scheme and a model for future projects.”

 

The process of building the barn started with the detailed Passivhaus design. Before any building works took place the design of the barn and how it was to be built was carried out. An essential part of building a Passivhaus is to decide that this is the target from the start. 

 

This is because the insulation needs to be wrapped around the walls, floors and roofs and it needs to connect to the windows and doors continuously. 

 

Heat is lost from buildings through warm air leaking out through openings in the construction and cold air seeping in through holes and openings. The Passivhaus standard requires the building to be airtight to reduce these losses. 

 

The triple glazed windows are designed to reduce heat losses and to provide heating from winter sunshine.

 

Heating is required but only small amounts compared to a current Building Regulations house. 

 

Keeping the building cool  by designing in ways to reduce overheating, in the summer is part of the process.

 

The details of the design are assessed by using the Passivhaus Planning Package (PHPP) software. This produces a very detailed model of the property and assesses the heat losses and gains for the building. and airtightness need to be considered from the start of the design process.