northern lights

Richard and Ros Maudslay’s self-build in rural Northumberland is not only highly energy efficient, but futureproofed for the homeowners’

When Richard and Ros Maudslay decided to swap the period charms of their 100-year-old house in

Northumberland for a self-build a few miles away, they had bagfuls of experience to draw on. The couple were already experienced renovators; Richard is a semi-retired engineer who managed a factory build on a greenfield site in Mexico; and their architect daughter was on hand to draw up the initial designs. There was only one problem. Like many self-builders before them, they decided to buy a site with a property already on it, with plans to demolish and rebuild the 1970s home. But the fact that the home had been unlived in for 15 years alerted the local planners to the possibility of bats (a protected species) living there.

Cue the arrival of the county ecologist, who insisted on eight bat boxes, including two special ones from Germany. That bat episode added £6,000 to the project’s costs and delayed the process by six months. But it did provide one unexpected advantage: extra time for researching products and suppliers. “We were able to spend a lot of time looking at magazines and checking out advertisers,” remembers Ros, a retired teacher. “Some were very expensive, so we found local suppliers who could do what we wanted. We went to a local supplier for the blinds, and they did a superb job; we also sourced all the stone tiling from a company in Yorkshire.”

Choosing a SIPs (structural insulated panels) construction route helped to speed up the process, as the panels were manufactured off-site by Yorkshire-based SIPS@Clays for an easy on-site build, despite the home’s complex design. The four-bedroom home was designed to cut into the plot’s sloping and rocky site, with a trapezoidal floorplan over two levels (there is only one standard square corner in the whole of the property), a complex 4.5m SIPs roof overhang and a monopitched roof which partially wraps down the rear elevation of the house. “When we saw the original £170,000 estimate for the zinc roofing, we gulped,” says Richard. “That was crazy money, so we decided to go for an aluminium standing seam product, which came in at around £60,000.”

The homeowners Richard and Ros Maudslay The project Contemporary-style self-build Location Northumberland Build system Structural insulated panels (SIPs), clad in brick

Build size Size 500m2 Plot cost Around £40/m2 Build cost Just over £2,000/m2 Timeline October 2016-November 2017