Orchard House

At the time their director, Will Campion, was only 22, but they have just finished constructing this smart home; proving you do not need to choose between sacrificing the budget or the environment.

Orchard house was about developing a new Lincolnshire typology, that envisioned a sustainable future for the rural, agricultural communities. The traditional agrarian architecture that’s quintessential to Lincolnshire was what inspired the gable design and striped textured cladding, reminiscent of the nearby barns and the standing-seam leadwork of neighbouring St Michael’s Church.

For our third, constructed house, we aimed for low-carbon, self-sufficiency, equipping it with a rainwater harvester, solar panels, an air-source heat pump and a heat-recovery system. This was still all for under £300,000, in addition to hundreds of pounds worth of savings per year in utility bills; here we made eco-friendliness synergistic with cost efficiency.

The house utilised SIPs panels filled full of insulation made from rapeseed oil, making sure the house was built from the most low-embodied energy materials. The larch board and batten cladding was invented and installed by Campion Design to tie together the reclaimed bricks and the timber to reimagine the verticality of the surrounding context and assimilate into the verdant landscape.

Internally, the house makes use of one large space that is defined by multiple ceiling heights. The unusual zig-zag room actually performs as 5 completely different spaces with varying light qualities, acoustics and well-being, managed by playing with the ceiling heights, window treatments, framed views, focal points and colours to remove the need of unnecessary walls that blocked heat flow and communication.

It'll be these aggregates of marginal gains that can help restore our symbiotic relationship with the planet; now more prevalent than ever. We believe saving the world doesn't have to cost the Earth. Orchard House was just our first step in achieving this vision of a eco-economic eudaimonia.

Annual CO2 emissions data (requested in kg/m2/year) was provided as follows: 1.4 tonnes of CO2