Hope House

This house was designed to sit on a flood plain, with a thermally massive and flood resistant ground floor supporting a two storey timber frame. A two and a half storey high south-facing conservatory with balcony terrace connects all floors, with the uppersurfaces clad in solar electric panels and solar thermal collectors. A planned set of environmental upgrades as they were afforded by the household, culminated in a zero-carbon specification by summer 2007.

Current technologies fitted include a small wood stove for space heating, an automated pellet boiler for domestic hot water in winter, evacuated tube solar thermal collectors providing all hot water from late spring to early autumn, a 1.1 kW peak photovoltaic array, and a 600-watt wind turbine.

The house was designed to facilitate home working, with the ground floor being designed with separate entrances, and was the original office for the ZEDfactory, with the future potential conversion into a granny flat. The house was built using locally sourced materials and labour, and provides an alternative aesthetic to the surrounding neo-Georgian or neo-Tudor architecture.

The house was designed to both provide privacy from neighbours and harvest sunlight through the obscured glass sunspace, at the same time as providing easterly views to the garden and surrounding landscape.