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Grand Designs Eco House
Kent TV takes a tour of Crossway, situated near Staplehurst, the eco house featured on Channel 4's Grand Designs and one of the UK's first "zero-carbon" homes. More Details View Transcript
View Synopsis
The Crossway Eco Home was on display at this year's South East Festival of Architecture, which runs until the 28th June. For a full listing of events taking place and information on how to join in logon to their website here. You can also watch Kent TV's film on the festival; see related films.
View Synopsis
Featuring RICHARD HAWKES, Architect and owner, Crossway
'Hi, this is Crossway, this is my house and I'm going to take you inside and show you around. Come through the vacuum-insulated doors that we have.
'Divided into four main rooms on the facing south... so we're trying to get as much daylight into the rooms that we use, so all the utility space like the bathroom and the utility room are kept on the north side, so that we just get the benefit of the sun where we want it.
'We've got triple glazing throughout the house and this space here has just been a triumph. It doesn't matter whether it's raining, windy, sunny you can come and stand in here and it's like being outside.
'This is the Heat Recovery Ventilation Unit. This is where we're bringing in fresh air from outside, recovering the heat from the old air and then passing the heat recovered air back out to the rest of the house. We've got data loggers so we can separately see how much electricity we're using and where we're using it, so we can kind of ascertain lifestyle aspects of the usage of energy.
'It's a pretty thin structure. There's no reinforcement in it; it's just three layers of structural tiles, then there's black rubber waterproofing on here and then another layer of thinner tiles which is just acting as a finish, so that you can see tiles from the top. There's a foot of soil up there to support local native flora and fauna, because eventually we want this to be just a living shaggy meadow roof.
'We've built a kind of diaphragm floor to spread the load out into the sidewalls of the house. The treads are made out of a very thick ply, the balustrades made from a flax rope made at Chatham Dockyard, just up the road. This is scaffold tube, this is recycled timber that the builder had from a project, previous project, and you know the clay tiles are from up the road. So it's all local, or recycled.
'So upstairs here, this is our guest bedroom, but as you see it's actually very open to the hallway because actually most of the time you don't have guests round so rather than having a room sitting there doing nothing we've got a room that is kind of open and makes it feel more of a day bed, so you can come up here and read a book in the afternoon and it's just like an upstairs lounge. But then when we do have guests around, we've got this big door that we swing open and then you've got a guest suite.
'We've got 26 square metres of the UK's first PVT system and this is a combined photo voltaic and solar thermal panel, so we generate our heat and our electricity from these panels. By keeping them cool you generate more electricity and in generating more electricity and extracting that heat we then store that heat downstairs in our phase change materials and it's free heat. So we get more electricity and the by-product of that is heat, which we also store. So it's superb... all these panels do is generate.
'Some of the stuff we've done here is going to be applicable to the common market and some if it's always going to be a bit avantgarde or maybe a bit, very high end, but by trying out a lot of different things and monitoring it and learning from it I think there's an awful lot we can get from this. To have a house that's got bills is not ideal, to have a house that's got no bills is even better, to have a house that gives you money back at the end of the year, that's where I want to go.'
'Hi, this is Crossway, this is my house and I'm going to take you inside and show you around. Come through the vacuum-insulated doors that we have.
'Divided into four main rooms on the facing south... so we're trying to get as much daylight into the rooms that we use, so all the utility space like the bathroom and the utility room are kept on the north side, so that we just get the benefit of the sun where we want it.
'We've got triple glazing throughout the house and this space here has just been a triumph. It doesn't matter whether it's raining, windy, sunny you can come and stand in here and it's like being outside.
'This is the Heat Recovery Ventilation Unit. This is where we're bringing in fresh air from outside, recovering the heat from the old air and then passing the heat recovered air back out to the rest of the house. We've got data loggers so we can separately see how much electricity we're using and where we're using it, so we can kind of ascertain lifestyle aspects of the usage of energy.
'It's a pretty thin structure. There's no reinforcement in it; it's just three layers of structural tiles, then there's black rubber waterproofing on here and then another layer of thinner tiles which is just acting as a finish, so that you can see tiles from the top. There's a foot of soil up there to support local native flora and fauna, because eventually we want this to be just a living shaggy meadow roof.
'We've built a kind of diaphragm floor to spread the load out into the sidewalls of the house. The treads are made out of a very thick ply, the balustrades made from a flax rope made at Chatham Dockyard, just up the road. This is scaffold tube, this is recycled timber that the builder had from a project, previous project, and you know the clay tiles are from up the road. So it's all local, or recycled.
'So upstairs here, this is our guest bedroom, but as you see it's actually very open to the hallway because actually most of the time you don't have guests round so rather than having a room sitting there doing nothing we've got a room that is kind of open and makes it feel more of a day bed, so you can come up here and read a book in the afternoon and it's just like an upstairs lounge. But then when we do have guests around, we've got this big door that we swing open and then you've got a guest suite.
'We've got 26 square metres of the UK's first PVT system and this is a combined photo voltaic and solar thermal panel, so we generate our heat and our electricity from these panels. By keeping them cool you generate more electricity and in generating more electricity and extracting that heat we then store that heat downstairs in our phase change materials and it's free heat. So we get more electricity and the by-product of that is heat, which we also store. So it's superb... all these panels do is generate.
'Some of the stuff we've done here is going to be applicable to the common market and some if it's always going to be a bit avantgarde or maybe a bit, very high end, but by trying out a lot of different things and monitoring it and learning from it I think there's an awful lot we can get from this. To have a house that's got bills is not ideal, to have a house that's got no bills is even better, to have a house that gives you money back at the end of the year, that's where I want to go.'
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