Project Description
Innovative Eco Home built to Passivhaus principles in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in the Suffolk Broads. Creek Cabin started as an experiment on the possibility to create a low impact home for future living whilst conserving the local flora and fauna. The result is a building which sits within the site with the grace of a living object. It is largely constructed out of natural materials and has a swathe of living elements which enhance the connection with the surrounding ecology.
What was the brief?
The clients owned a small holiday cottage on the site whilst living in London for work. They wanted to move out of London and live on the site and therefore needed a more suitable dwelling which would meet their spatial and environmental needs. The brief was to create a new building which would enhance the surroundings, respect the environment, deal with the risks from flooding and poor access while meeting very high energy standards, appropriate to the 21st century and sustainable into the future.
What were the challenges?
The site sits within an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), adjacent to the creek and reedbeds which is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and is also in a prominent position on the road into Southwold and thus very sensitive from a planning point of view. This means that extensive pre-application consultation with the local authority and statutory consultees was required to provide the necessary reassurance of design quality in a sensitive location. Situated within the flood risk zone, the building needed a flood-resilient approach to construction. To achieve this, the ground floor was designed with a solid concrete floor slab and brick and block wall construction. To be flood resilient, the bricks had to be selected with a low moisture absorption. This limited the choice amongst local bricks and Cambridge Gault was chosen.
The first-floor cladding is Kebony, which is sustainable softwood with an environmentally friendly bio-based treatment which develops a natural silver- grey patina after exposure to sun and rain. The first floor was designed to sit above the 1 in 1000 year flood event level plus climate change allowance and a bridge to the adjacent bank provides a safe evacuation route. The bedroom mezzanine has an escape route via the external stair to the first-floor refuge level. Another challenge was the requirement to achieve high levels of thermal comfort whilst keeping the embodied carbon low. This was achieved by using a largely timber structure, with sheep wool and wood fibre insulation on the upper levels. Additionally, the project is extremely technically complex, with the client requiring a range of innovative features including a green roof designed to ‘float’ above the main building, a pneumatic lift and a range of off-grid energy systems. All of this has been achieved with excellent delivery on a technical, aesthetic, and environmental level.
