Architect Phil Bixby and his artist wife Caroline Lewis turned a dilapidated terraced home into a fabulous eco friendly passive house

Yorkshire Post

Architect Phil Bixby and his artist wife Caroline Lewis turned a dilapidated terraced home into a fabulous eco friendly passive house that won two York Design awards

Transcript

00:00Welcome to Hogmore Terrace and a quick video tour of our home.

00:05Situated at the bottom of Little Hogmore, it's a quiet part of York that I never knew existed,

00:10until I designed a passive house for Tim and JJ Sheppard.

00:15A year or so later the house next door came up for sale.

00:19A rather tired Victorian terraced house, but with a piece of land to the side of it,

00:24meant that as well as the existing house being retrofitted, we could extend it.

00:30Our plans were to bring the existing house up to modern standards,

00:35to put photovoltaics onto the south-facing gate wall,

00:38and to build two extensions, one to provide an office for me,

00:41and one to extend the living accommodation of the house across the back of the site.

00:46This would give views out onto the enclosed rear garden,

00:50and the rather lovely former landfill site planted with trees to the rear of the house,

00:55which is now a wildlife area.

01:00While the extensions were thoroughly contemporary,

01:03we kept the existing house looking traditional,

01:06by replacing the aluminium windows that there would be moved in,

01:10with Victorian look-alike triple glazed windows set back into the ravines where they would have been.

01:17These are tilt and turn windows which still give ventilation when you need it,

01:22but are wonderfully well insulated.

01:25You can see the extra reveal there from 100mm of insulation on the inside of that front wall.

01:32On the gate wall of the house we externally insulated with 150mm of insulation,

01:37and you can see we carefully covered the edges of it with custom-made aluminium trims

01:43to fit up against the existing brickwork near to the roof.

01:47The lower part of the walls were rendered.

01:50The upper part we installed photovoltaic cells,

01:54both to the gate wall and then to the rear addition roof of the house.

02:00Internally, we opened up the back of the house and the flank wall of the back addition

02:05to create a new space which linked the existing back room,

02:09which is now a dining room, into a new kitchen and living space,

02:12which ran right across the full width of the site.

02:17The extensions are timber frame built on raft foundations.

02:21The foundations were prepared, the frames all turned up along with a very large crane,

02:26and then were lifted into place.

02:29They're all 300mm thick passive house specification, fully filled with insulation,

02:35and the timber frame was all erected within about a day and a half.

02:42You can see the depth of insulation from the step in the floor here.

02:47The new roofs are flat roofs with a green roof system with sedum,

02:53which is just about to come into flower now.

02:56The external doors and windows are all triple glazed passive house specification

03:02to give us lots of light and lots of views out into the garden to the west of the house.

03:09One of our aims was to ensure we got good air tightness throughout

03:12so we could install mechanical ventilation with heat recovery.

03:16This ensures that we get clean air throughout the house

03:19and also that the heat within the building ends up where we want it to be.

03:23The sophisticated box of tricks gives us plenty of information about what's going on within the system.

03:30The photovoltaics feed into battery storage

03:33and the Tesla app gives you a complete rundown on the state of charge of the battery,

03:40where any energy is going to and coming from,

03:43and also what energy you've used and generated for whatever period you choose to look at.

03:50It all works efficiently, but more importantly it's a lovely place to be.

03:54We love the openness of the living space with the kitchen to its heart

03:58and the way that the glazing to the west side of the house

04:02brings in afternoon and evening sunlight

04:05and links the nature outside with the living spaces inside.

04:13Sun shading gives a sheltered terrace and also stops the sun overheating the living spaces in the summer

04:20and the terrace leads out onto a small garden and a wildflower meadow planted to the rear.

04:26Thank you for coming round our house.

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