We gained planning consent for this 450 sqm new build sustainable house near Farnham, in the Planning district of Waverley Council. The new house replaces a post-war chalet style dwelling with a bold contemporary structure, designed to meet the client’s brief of a highly sustainable modern home, optimising the site and its views. We required careful negotiation with the planning department, as well as neighbours; and several applications to gain consent. The key criteria for consent was that the new house was not ‘materially larger than the replacement dwelling’.

The house is conceived as a timber clad first floor volume visually ‘floating’ over a predominantly glazed ground floor rear. A double height living space projects to the rear and bisects this volume, framing the views of the site and the distant countryside. A kitchen, dining room, playroom and study provide the primary accommodation to the rear, serviced by store, plant room, utility, WC and cinema room to the North/front of the house. The front elevation is a more solid masonry structure at ground level and timber above.

Five bedrooms are provided at first floor level, including a master suite on the East end of the building, complete with its own terrace.  An attached annex contains 2 bedrooms and living space. Ancillary buildings to manage the woodland and a replacement swimming pool are also proposed for the site.

A carefully hard-landscaped garden designed by Alladiosims garden designers will integrate the building into its surroundings, and blur the line between indoor and outside living spaces. The scheme provides a series of terraces, bbq and seating areas, with retaining walls filled with wild flower planting cascading down to a new replacement swimming pool.

The house will be designed to be very energy efficient, meeting high levels of air tightness, thermal insulation and optimising renewable energy on site with a combination of solar heating and PV panels locked into the feed in tariffs. We will look to use offsite construction to increase efficiency of the build and the quality of construction.