Couple reveal grand (and green) design

A MAN who transformed the site of his childhood home into an eco-friendly house has been featured on Grand Designs.

Tony Searby, of Stoke Row, appeared on an episode of the long-running Channel 4 architectural design show which aired on Wednesday evening.

He has spent the last five years building his house on the same plot where his late father built their family home in the Sixties.

The six-bedroom house is built in a horseshoe shape, set in a woodland clearing, with large windows that look out on to the surrounding nature.

It has been finished with high-tech features that aim to foster healthy living, including biodynamic lighting, which will continually change colour to reflect the shift of daylight to help preserve the body’s natural circadian rhythm. The house is powered by solar panels that connect to large batteries, providing up to nine months’ worth of power annually.

The home also achieves a standard of thermal insulation that is four times more efficient than current building regulations.

Construction for the house began in July 2019 and Mr Searby said the project is 70 per cent complete. He and his wife Ara have now moved in after living in a mobile home during the build.

Mr Searby said: “The idea is that the site is circle-ish with woodlands on three out of four sides.

“When you stand in the middle of the site and look up at the tree line in summer, you see what is approximately a circular blue sky and a ring of trees that go round it. The idea that I shared with the architect, Nigel Hefferman, was to create something that fitted into nature. We essentially created a horseshoe house but if you count the balcony, it is actually a ring because the balcony crosses the horseshoe. Inside the centre of the horseshoe is a little paved area with what will eventually be a fish pond.

“Every part of the house can look into that central circle area. We then have an expanse of grass that goes around the house and then we have the trees outside that. It has been designed to be a shape which is in keeping with the curves of nature.

“It doesn’t have too many right angles in it. There are curved shapes everywhere, which has made it more time consuming to build and expensive.”

Mr Searby, a former physiologist, said that he had picked up the necessary skills to build the house gradually as he went through the project.

He said: “I got contractors in to do the plumbing and the electrics and ventilation system but I did the flooring, the walls, the ceilings, all of that.

“Much of the furniture I’ve made from sheets of plywood and I’ve made the kitchen units and wardrobes and things that I designed myself to fit in exactly to the spaces that we had and to deal with the fact that we’ve got curves. Ikea don’t do curves.”

One of the problems Mr Searby encountered during the build was completing the curved roof. He initially struggled to find a contractor to finish it and spent much of the winter of 2019 preventing rain damage.

He said: “It was October/November time and it was very wet, as it is now, and it was really difficult to try and keep the roof from flooding or leaking through into the house.

“We got a whole load of black plastic, rolls of sheeting but because of all the curves, the water found its way of creeping in and we had leaks every time it rained.

“That was the most stressful challenge for me. It was particularly stressful when water just came through one ceiling and then came and found its way through the next ceiling and I thought it would damage the fabric of the house. In the end I went for extra scaffolding and had the whole roof scaffolded over, and that created a dry space for the people who were doing the roofing. I did part of it myself, laying boards down, but a company came in to make it watertight. That was a massive relief.”

Mr Searby admits that, despite the polished appearance of the house on the programme, he still has about 30 per cent of it to finish, including adding a glass balustrade to the balcony.

He said: “It was finished sufficiently for Grand Designs to do their filming and they did a great job in making it look like it was more finished than it actually was with creative photography.

“It’s finished enough for us to be able to live in it but there are still bits that are unfinished. There’s about a quarter of the main part of the house plus one spare bedroom that hasn’t been completed but I am slowly making progress.”

Mr Searby said that he had enjoyed filming the show alongside its longstanding host Kevin McCloud.

He said: “Kevin himself is lovely. He is, in real life, the way he comes across on camera. He is positive, he’s enthusiastic, knowledgeable and insightful.

“He doesn’t need written scripts or anything. He’s smart enough, articulate enough and eloquent enough to create the natural language that is authentic to whatever he wishes to communicate.

“Grand Designs has its structure, it’s basically the hero’s journey, which is you start out with a vision and you embark upon the vision and then adversity has to hit.

“Then the problem, to whatever degree it is, is overcome and you end up with the final reveal at the end of the programme. Grand Designs has clearly stood the test of time, largely because people love Kevin’s way of doing it.”

Mr Searby said he felt that he had replaced his parents’ bungalow with a house that was suitable for the modern age.

He said: “[My dad] built it in the early Sixties, 1962, I think. He designed a house that was beautiful from a functionality point of view, for family life in the Sixties and Seventies and indeed all the way through to the end of my parents’ lives.

“It was a house that worked then but it wasn’t the type of house that was appropriate for what we wanted moving forward. It was for that reason that I felt, let’s create something that is designed around our needs in such a way that it is ecologically sound and environmentally healthy.

“It does feel as though this is the right house for the right site at this particular point in history. Just as when my dad built it, I think what he created what was exactly the right house for that site at that particular time.

“History proved him correct in that it was a lovely place for me to grow up in.”

The episode is available to watch on Channel 4 on demand.