Inside Green House: RIBA House of the Year 2023 winner

[birds chirping] [gentle music]

[Nick Hayhurst] I don't think we have any other option

other than to be designing ecologically

and trying to actively

do as many low carbon measures as we can.

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The issue as architects is that almost everything

that we do, in some way, uses energy.

And so really, the task is about trying

to reduce the amount of energy that we use,

both in the buildings as we build them,

but also, how they will be used the longterm.

We are in Green House in Tottenham, North London.

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We were approached by Tom and Amandine about four years ago

after they'd bought this site

and were looking to create a new family home.

So when Tom and Amandine bought this plot,

it had a very badly built in 1980s house.

We did look at ways that we might convert it or extend it,

but it was in such terrible condition

that we weren't able to do that.

So what we're working to do is to try to restore the site

to what it historically would've been,

which is a green landscape, which had greenhouses,

and orchards, and market gardens,

rather than the kind of brick house

that was here previously.

[gentle music]

Whilst the design has changed a little bit,

I think the very first idea that we presented

at the very first meeting is very much what you see today.

The form of the house was very simple.

It was a block form,

which gave us the most efficient structure

in terms of thermal envelope

because it gives it a good form factor,

which means that it maintains heat.

And then, in terms of materials,

a cross-laminated timber frame

was probably the most sustainable way

we could build it structurally.

The cross-laminated timber frame was grown

and made in panels in Austria.

And then, once it was on site,

it was assembled within about 10 days,

which I think helped to expediate the construction process.

We were working with quite a tight budget in this project.

And we were very aware from the clients that there was no,

[chuckles] no space to go over budget.

So we had to get quite creative

with the materials we were using.

So there's quite a few areas in the building

where we've sort of misused materials

or used 'em in a slightly unusual way.

So for example, the external cladding is a very,

very low-cost agricultural roofing sheet,

which costs about five pounds a square meter

made of recycled paper mixed with bitumen.

The pavers outside were reclaimed breeze blocks bought off

Thumb Tree and there's some infill on the top

which are polished down to make them kind of a smooth paver,

but they're quite beautiful for what they used to be.

Also the flooring upstairs is cork rubber,

originally designed for industrial gaskets.

It's a kind of natural eco pop combination

with the natural materials,

but then the kind of the poppiness of the green

and then obviously, the curtains, as well,

kind of add a sense of fun to the project.

[birds chirping]

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[Tom] When we first briefed Hayhurst and Co.

by the project,

we tried to keep the brief as open as possible.

There's a few reasons for that.

One, I think creatively,

it's nice to kind of let people run with it

with their own ideas.

Secondly was budget.

We knew our budget was very limited

and so we wanted to give you guys the biggest kind

of free reign to use that budget efficiently.

[Claire] I think the thing that was quite exciting

for us in your brief is that you wanted something

that was a bit innovative and a bit experimental

and Tom and Amandine were willing to take risks

and do details and things

that maybe we hadn't done before either.

That's always a good brief to get [laughs]

as an architects and quite fun.

[gentle music]

So, this space we like

to affectionately call the Tottenham Riad

and it has a number of purposes in terms of its design.

Number one, it brings daylight in from above

where side facing windows wouldn't have been possible

due to the neighboring houses.

It also serves to connect all of the upstairs bedrooms

with the downstairs living space.

So it's really kind of the heart of the home.

[Tom] When you've got two young kids, it's pretty amazing.

We kind of feel constantly connected to what they're doing

without being on top of them.

There's nothing they like more than running laps

around the gallery space up there.

I think we were a bit worried about noise

and acoustics in the house.

So you guys came up with the idea of using these curtains,

[curtain slides]

which not only visually help to separate spaces,

so we can pull this curtain across here

and pull that curtain over there.

It also really helps with the acoustics.

[Claire] It's also to be able

to separate this central space off

as a kind of quite cool double height space

and also gives a bit of flexibility

to divide off the living spaces.

[Tom] And again, two young kids who are quite loud.

We really noticed the benefit

of having some soft furnishings.

As you use the house in different ways,

different little elements of fun kind of pop up,

which I think is important in architecture and often gets

overlooked for the kind of seriousness of the practice.

So this is the living room.

This area feels really nice

and hunkered down with 60 centimeters

below the ground level here.

So when we sit on the sofa, it feels really cozy.

[Claire] As a part of the concept of the house,

of kind of feeling like you're living in the landscape

and rather than doing the kind

of conventional, contemporary thing,

which is to have big, wide, open glass doors onto a patio,

what we decided instead was to bring the planting close

to the house so you feel like the garden is part

of the house or that you are part of the garden.

[uplifting music] [birds chirping]

So now we're in the back garden.

We designed this with a friend of ours

who's an amazing garden designer called Ollie Allen.

He really helped make a layout

that gave us these little rooms and these really dense beds,

but also had space for the kids to run around and play.

He was very good at hiding some little exciting features

[bushes rustling]

like our 10-foot tall topiary dinosaur,

which is covering the kids' tree house,

which is through this little kind of secret path.

The garden is a really nice layering from the house,

so it feels like another room of the house.

[Claire] The front garden has a kind

of more Mediterranean feel.

It's kind of the sunny side,

whereas this garden definitely feels quite lush and tropical

and it's a bit wild as well.

I quite like that about it.

[Tom] It's also, 90% of it is evergreen,

so it stays like this all year round.

Little spot there,

we spend a lot of time

on summer days hanging out there while the kids are playing

in paddling pools and making a mess.

[instrumental music]

[gentle music]

So now we're in the kitchen.

For budget reasons,

we stuck to a not super expensive high street chain kitchen,

but to give it that little kind of extra pop,

this is made out of a product called Jesmonite,

which is a polymer modified concrete that has marble,

so it makes it white,

but it means you can kind of add pops of color.

So we really like the idea of using recycled glass,

recycled pebbles, gravel, old chippings and marble.

So we made big tiles, smashed them up,

and then put 'em in mold to make the kitchen.

Basically, had a very long lockdown while I couldn't work.

So this, this [chuckles] became my hobby, I guess.

Early on, when we talked about the layout,

you wanted to be able to be cooking here

and then have full sight of the house

so you can see out to the front garden from here.

You can also see out to the back garden

and over the central dining space.

So whoever's in here cooking is not isolated

from the rest of the house and the family

while they're in here.

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So this is the primary suite.

It's an amazing place to wake up

and a big part of that is this bamboo wall.

It feels really private and it feels like we're in nature.

Part of the design for this was

to provide a kind of natural privacy screen

without having to constantly be opening and closing curtains

and it provides that in a beautiful way

and that you're looking out into greenery.

This is also the south-facing elevation of the house

and we were aware that we wanted

to make sure these bedrooms were properly shaded.

So there's an overhang over the facade

which protects these windows from high, hot summer sun

and the bamboo also serves as a light shading device.

So you get this kind of quite cool dappled sun

and soft shading in the bedrooms.

And the polycarbonate screens on the outside of that,

which enables them to close off the bedroom

and provide this completely private,

but tropical, oasis.

[Tom] That's something we do a lot.

In winter, we'll close the polycarbonate

and then we won't actually use these curtains at all.

The bamboo really helps with conditioning the air.

It gives us nice fresh air coming through.

All the water for the bamboo throughout the house is reused

rainwater that we collect in a big tank.

Well, actually one more thing is,

it became a bit of a lockdown hobby,

but this shower tray is something

that I made before the house was built.

It's human made with recycled gravel

and the product called Jesmonite

and every morning, I wake up and have a shower

and it makes me very happy.

This is our spare bedroom,

one of the two spare bedrooms.

This again got the bamboo screening,

the same as our primary suite.

So this is one of my children's rooms.

The bedrooms are all relatively small and quite simple.

We did try and do some things that were kind of space saving

and clever uses of space

and this bunk bed is one of them.

So each bedroom has got a bunk bed

that is on top of each other,

but the wall kind of does an S shape around the bed.

So one male, this one sleeps up here,

and then in the next bedroom there's another bunk bed.

So they have private rooms with beds,

but they're kinda stacked on top of each other

and then they each have like a desk space.

So it's just all about maximizing space.

[Claire] We were also aware of flexibility,

that maybe in the future, these guys might want

to make a couple of bigger bedrooms.

So all the partitions between bedrooms

can all be relatively easily taken down

to make bigger bedrooms

or even make more smaller rooms,

which means that there's flexibility for Tom and his family.

[gentle music]

[crickets chirping] [gentle music]

[Nick] The scope of the kind

of environmental criteria here extends

in a number of different ways.

So one of them is about how the energy is captured new,

so there's a number of solar panels on the roof

that capture energy.

They then help power an air source heat pump

and so, the pump provides the heating

for the space heating and the hot water.

There's also a battery linked to the solar panels

and any excess energy that's created from the solar panels,

it gets stored in the battery

and is then used at a later point.

During the summer months,

the house is pretty much off grid in terms

of its energy usage.

[Claire] We also integrated a number

of passive environmental measures into the building,

such as the space that we're in now,

which cools the house through opening panes

at the top of the space,

which open when the temperature rises

and draws the air through the house

and hot air rises and exits through the windows.

[Nick] This house, Green House,

is A-rated in terms of its EPC rating

and is also well below the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge

in terms of embodied carbon targets.

[Claire] For me, it was really exciting

walking in the first time we came back

after Tom and Amandine and their family had moved in.

You obviously spend so many hours looking at models

and drawings and detailing every corner of a building.

Then you spend several months on site going

to site every week watching it gradually come together.

So to then see it finally come to life

and people living it, enjoying it,

was really great to see.

And it was also really nice to see the kids finding new uses

for the spaces that we maybe hadn't imagined,

playing hide and seek behind the curtains,

running round and round the mezzanine upstairs.

[Nick] Yeah, I think it's always that kind

of coming back into a house that you'd spent

so long designing and delivering

and then beginning to see

that it being used in the way in which A,

you thought it might have been,

but also B, kind of other ways and to kind of other uses

and other nooks and crannies kind of

that you hadn't necessarily designed

as being used in that way.

It's always one of the reasons why we do what we do

and that helps us kind of get out of bed in the morning

to design the next project.

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