Wolds a STUNNING piece of Grand Design!

EXTRAORDINARY VILLAGE HOME FEATURED ON POPULAR CHANNEL FOUR TV SHOW

A COUPLE living in the Lincolnshire Wolds have just featured on Channel 4’s Grand Designs to showcase their extraordinary home transformation.

Henry and Jen Salmon, from Hatcliffe, live at Barrow House which was transformed into a contemporary barn nestled in the heart of ourWolds.

The property was nominated along with four other homes as the ‘House of the Year’ on the programme.

The couple featured on last week’s programme, which documents the unusual and often elaborate architectural homebuilding projects across the UK.

And the producers certainly found something special with this one.

Barrow House was designed by ID Architects in Grimsby and constructed by Belvin Construction in Nettleham.

Barrow House is also the proud winner of a regional Royal Institute of British Architects Award 2021 in Yorkshire.

Henry describes the process of wanting to build something special.

He said: “We have this plot of land we wanted to build on and I went to ID Architecture and asked what we could do to it.

“They gave us some plans for it. We had initial plans to build a relatively standard house on there.

“But with the plot being outside the development boundary and in an area of outstanding natural beauty, we’d have to do something very different and change our plans to get the required permission for it.

“The only route we could go down was to build in the countryside and outside of a development boundary in order to get it passed through the planning framework.

“That meant we had to do something that was outstanding architecturally and innovative which is how we changed tact to come up with the design we finally got.”

The house took around a year to build after working through ideas with the architect.

Hatcliffe is a place close to Henry’s heart.

He said: “My parents live next door and they owned that land so it was an ideal opportunity for us to build Barrow House there.

“I grew up next door in the family house and I’ve always lived in the area of Hatcliffe.

ID Architecture entered the house for a Royal Institute of British Architects Award in Yorkshire which it won this year.

Following the award success, Channel 4’s Grand Designs team were keen to feature the property.

Henry said: “It was fantastic and really nice to be nominated and awarded the prestigious title.

“I like everything in the house. We absolutely love living here.

“Kevin McCloud was a really nice man too, just full of questions.

“The build was stressful at times but definitely worth it in the end to get the final product.”

Andy Inch, an architectural designer from ID Architecture, described the route of getting the house completed from its initial planning stage.

He said: “It was back in 2016 when Henry and Jen first contacted us about this.

“They had a bit of land that belonged to their parents which they wanted to do something with.

“They wanted to put a barn conversion building on there but because it’s in a site of outstanding beauty, we knew we couldn’t do that.

“So we recommended to go through a paragraph 80 in the National Planning Policy framework - which sets out planning in isolated rural locations with various clauses.

“We were particularly interested with ‘Clause E’ which deals with exceptional dwellings and there are several things you have to achieve to be classified as exceptional.

“And it has to improve its sight which is not always easy.”

He added: “The site was an ex arable site and it had overgrown and become over wild with grasses.

“We knew we could improve the site with biodiversity and landscaping so we had to try to develop something on there.

“There’s a very obvious landscape feature close by, Hatcliffe Barrow, which is an ancient bronze age burial site, a protected monument.

“It became obvious that the site had to relate to that.

“Hatcliffe Manor isn’t far away and so we wanted to create something in tune with that really.”

Andy feels that the materials used to create Barrow House were key.

He told your Grimsby Telegraph: “We used rusting Corten steel, when you first install it, it looks like a normal mild steel plate but within a month or six weeks it starts to oxidise and turns a brownish-orange colour.

“It’s a nice material and we chose it because we wanted a simple material pallet for the building.

“Alongside this site there’s barns that the parent’s own and you can see the gable walls and we wanted a material which, from a distance, would look like a pantile barn.

“But when you look closer in, it looks like an agricultural shed so it’s quite effective really.”

“The house uses a very sustainable form of concrete called GGBS (Ground Granulated Blast-furnace Slag) which uses a waste product from steel manufacturing to replace the Portland cement.

“It reduces around 60 per cent of the Portland cement - which is the worst part of the cement for using energy.

“It’s a much more sustainable form of energy.”

And Andy was incredibly proud of all the hard work and effort placed to make this property the stunning piece it was.

He said: “The planners were very helpful and supportive throughout.

“The process was very quick as well.

“Myself and Rob Cook were the main designers on the project at ID Architecture.