Our Brockenhurst House has been shortlisted in this years Build It Awards, in the ‘Best Architect or Designer for a Conservation or Renovation Project’. The annual industry awards that celebrates the most inspiring architectural projects and inventive products in the self-build sector, judged by industry leaders.
Brockenhurst House exemplifies how thoughtful, design-led architecture can elevate everyday living. What began as a tired 1970s chalet-style property has been transformed into a refined, low-carbon contemporary home, designed to support its owners’ evolving needs while treading lightly on the planet.
We look forward to the winners being revealed later this year.
As autumn begins, we’ve seen exciting progress across several projects. There have been dramatic changes on site in the New Forest, we’ve once again supported the Homebuilding & Renovating Awards, and our Allegra’s Ambition public art commission has now been installed in Winchester.
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Courtyard House, SIPs Structure
It was fantastic to see the significant progress at Courtyard House during our recent site visit. This exciting project is delivering a striking contemporary home near Burley, in the heart of the New Forest National Park.
The property is being constructed using Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs), a high-performance composite building system that offers a modern alternative to traditional construction methods. Fabricated off-site, these panels greatly reduce on-site construction time. For this project, it has meant that all walls and the majority of the roofing structure has been erected in under a month!
Judging Industry Awards
Darren was once again invited to join the judging panel for the prestigious Homebuilding & Renovating Awards, held in partnership with The Times and The Sunday Times.
The panel of eight expert judges had the enjoyable, but challenging, task of reviewing all the entries and narrowing them down to a shortlist of just 25 outstanding properties. From this shortlist, the panel will now work together to select the winners for each category.
Have your say! You can also get involved by voting for your favourite project in the Readers’ Choice Award – just click here to vote.
Allegras Ambition Public Artwork Installed
We’re very proud to see the public art we designed for Allegras Ambition now installed outside Winchester Sports Centre.
Our team won the public art competition last year with a well concieved design that incorporates the charity’s logo into a beautifully tactile wooden seat sculpture. The shape of the structure forms a welcoming enclosure, inviting people to gather, sit, lounge, or even climb and crawl across its undulating surface.
Following on from our win of Architectural Practice of the Year at this years South Coast Property Awards, Darren was invited to participate in a round table discussion last week, with the other winners from this year’s awards.
The open discussion looked at opportunities and challenges we all face within the vibrant property sector across the south coast, including changes to the planning process, opportunities within the commercial sector to encourage staff back into the office, and how to make full use of technology to increase efficiency.
The organisers are looking to write a full report on the discussions, which we hope to share soon.
The construction of Courtyard House has come on impressively since we were last onsite to visit. In the past three weeks the house build has progressed from just the finished concrete slab, to now having all the external and internal walls in place, and with most of the roof installed.
The house is being built using Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) a high performing composite building system which can be used as an alternative to traditional building methods. One of the key benefits of using this system is the speed of construction onsite, as they are made offsite to exact measurements, which means the time needed onsite is vastly reduced, on average down by 55% from traditional construction methods.
You can really start to see our initial concept designs starting to take shape on site, check out the comparision photos and you can find more project details here.
Our Cedarwood project has been featured in the August edition of Self Builder Magazine.
The article investigates how the property, a timber-framed 1950s bungalow, has been transformed and upgraded, to create a low energy home. The owners, Lettie and Tom had fallen in love with the property and bought it at auction, but didn’t realise just how much work would be involved in bringing it up to modern standards.
This month we are celebrating the groundbreaking at the Courtyard House; a new build contemporary home located in Burley, at the heart of the New Forest National Park.
The design of the replacement dwelling offers a greatly improved spatial plan for the tight, elongated site. The scheme enhances the site constraints, by organising the internal spaces around two cut-outs made in the form of courtyards, breaking up the linear nature of the single storey home.
Due to issues around retrofitting the previous property, as it was so poorly constructed and not at all energy efficient, it was decided that it was better way forward to replace the building rather than renovating.
