Visit to Julian Marsh's house

18 Feb 2012: DNC writes: "Project Nottingham organised a visit to Julian Marsh's house in the Meadows, Nottingham. Although I have seen it from the outside, and heard Julian's lecture and read the article in the Architects Journal, I hadn't seen the interior. 

Panoramic image of the front, with the house closely touching the neighbours at the corner - significantly reducing their heat losses. The front entrance has steps because it was built before the recent Severn-Trent flood prevention bank was built, and there is disabled access at the side door.

Steel Stair and Bottle Wall - the stair is of bent mild steel plate, and the baluster has stretched flexible PVC curtaining of the sort used in warehouses - a reminiscence of the old Meat Factory on the site. The wall is of concrete shelves alternating with recycled Ecover bottles filled with salt water. This has a high thermal capacity (4 times that of concrete) and soaks up winter sun, and releases it later. I am inspired to start collecting bottles myself now! The grilles in the floor allow cool air from the cavity below the ground floor during the hot months of summer.

 Wood-burning stove and flue at the centre of the house in the double height living space. There is also a large roof light above, cascading the room with daylight. Most of the floor is light cream coloured rubber surface, giving high daylight levels internally.

Rainwater purification filters - these provide most of the cold water, except the main CW tap in the kitchen that remains connected to the mains. The house is heated by a Dimplex ground source heat pump, with underfloor heating. There is a MVHR system for ventilation support, and the ground and first floors have concrete ceilings for optimum thermal mass.

 Teak washbasin in the bathroom - and there is teak flooring in the shower. As the ensuite bathroom is furthest from the stair, it has a concealed door which leads to a fire escape.

Entrance courtyard elevation - the garden is full of raised vegetable beds, and under the walkway is a 4000 litre rainwater storage tank. The PV array is facing due south at the perfect angle. There are more PVs behind the beam above the roof. There are fixing points for a wind turbine that never happened because of opposition from the planners.
  There are many other features, such as the composting toilet, the use of a larder instead of a fridge, the sunspace design of the front facade, the use of flitched parallax beams and columns, multi walled polycarbonate panels, parking space for electric car, and more that make this house totally unique and unrepeatable - it is totally born of the spirit of its location and of Julian's ingenuity."

Visit to Green Street

29 October 2011: The WB Ecohouses group were invited to view the show house in the Green Street development in the Meadows - by architects Marsh Grochowski, and developers Blueprint. See more detail at:
http://www.ourgreenstreet.co.uk/downloads/Scheme%20Summary.pdf

John Long, for Blueprint was showing us around, and we had about a dozen members from WB Ecohouses. This was a brave venture to build in an area that has been 'postcoded', i.e. has lower house prices than south of the river, but the quality of the houses has been sufficient to generate a huge amount of interest. The architect, Julian, lives nearby in a self-built house, and Blueprint have a policy of sustainable development. There are 38 houses, and it's a reasonable risk that there are 38 families willing to move to energy efficient houses like these, so Blueprint went ahead with the scheme.

The houses are almost Passivhaus standard, with a high attention to thermal insulation, thermal break detailing, MVHR, on site power generation, high quality windows and other features. Added to which they have wonderful qualities of daylighting and space. They have a good urban density (being compact town houses to 3 stories) with roof gardens and on site car storage.

The houses of the second phase have an excellent view of the Victoria Gardens park on the Embankment. There was such high demand for these that they were sold by sealed bid, demonstrating that there are more than 38 families who recognise quality!

These houses of the first phase have high performance windows with external window blinds, operable from within. Each window has a small anemometer so that they blinds can retract in high wind conditions.  The houses all have PV panels on the roofs, although only a token amount per house. We were distressed to see that subsequent fitting of satellite dishes and TV aerials appear to have misunderstood the risks of shading to the PV panels (many of which seemed to be partially shaded.)
  It is nice that John seems to know all the buyers of the properties. He has also got some shared promotion with the Riverbank restaurant, to get help with leafletting and hospitality. 

Green Street eco housing

Eco Houses are attracting a lot of interest, judging by the speed at which the new homes on Green Street in the Meadows sold. Here are a few paragraphs about this development:

The development, which is a mixture of three and four bed contemporary town houses, comprises 38 homes in total. Designed by Nottingham based award winning architects, Marsh Grochowski, it is positioned next to the picturesque Victoria Gardens on the Trent Embankment.

The scheme builds on Blueprint’s core values of design driven quality and sustainability. Features include solar photovoltaic supplemented electricity, whole-house heat recovery, super insulation and air tightness way above new building standards.

The homes were priced from around £175,000 to £235,000 and were sold nationally by Savills via their Nottingham office and locally by Royston & Lund in West Bridgford. 

Three contrasting eco-houses

Local architect Julian Marsh has passed me details of an ultra-low energy refurbishment in Nottingham city centre - converting a lacemaker's house into an up-to-date eco home. Click Lacemaker's house to view.

If you are looking for more modest refurbishment ideas (including low cost improvements), have a look at LowEhouses.

And if you'd like to read more about the very interesting eco home that Julian Marsh made for himself (below)  on the site of an old meat factory, click here.

If you are familiar with the Passive House methodology, this offers a different approach to achieving a sustainable home which Julian calls the Active House approach.

(The text has kindly been made available to us by the Architect's Journal from this article in their March 2011 issue. www.architectsjournal.co.uk)

House in the Meadows is a cheerfully good example!

8 Feb '11: DNC writes: I met Julian Marsh, one of my architect friends today, who was visiting the Dept of Arch and Built Environment. He has a self designed house in Nottingham and is the architect of the highly excellent Green St houses in the Meadows. He promotes the idea of the 'Active house' as better than Passive house, a sort of cheerful British interpretation of the slightly joyless German ideal.

    That idea is more like the Peveril solar house, where you don't have to live in a airtight box, dependent on a fan for breathing. You make sensible use of the PV and a heat pump, open the windows in summer for ventilation, have a sunspace with openable shutters, allow the occupants to make sensible energy saving decisions such as solar shading by day or closing curtains at night. Architecturally, it is quite unique, a great way to use a corner site.

    Like me, he has been monitoring his energy figures, to try to get below carbon zero. I will invite him as a speaker to one of our West Bridgford Ecohouses meetings in the future.
    I gather that Julian's house is about as carbon zero as the Peveril house, i.e. is covering the heating, and more than that, but with the 4kW limit on PV panels in the British Feed in tariff, he doesn't have enough PV to cover the entire electrical consumption. With being on a corner site, he has two party walls, so has fewer external wall surfaces to lose heat - and doing a big favour to the adjoining neighbours!

   He does have a small amount of MVHR, but not on the whole house - uses it on the most lived-in zones of the house. He also has rainwater collection and a host of eco-materials, recycled timber beams, bottle walls and much more. The articles in the links below provide additional information.

In 10 March 2011, the Architects Journal devoted a long feature article to Julian's house. (Unfortunately there's a paywall on the AJ website, but if you are a subscriber it is visible)
also visible are these links:

http://timgarrattnottingham.co.uk/2010/09/28/nottingham-grand-designs/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/content/articles/2009/10/05/trent_meadows_feature.shtml
http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/news/Green-vision-starts-home/article-960505-detail/article.html