Having built their own home once before, the world of self-build wasn’t new to Craig and Jane, but building a multi-generational house for their family was an entirely fresh challenge
TEXT Jayne Dowle IMAGES Dug Wilders
If building a brand-new house in a village conservation area wasn’t challenging enough, the new family home of Craig and Jane Devonshire also had to be multi-generational.
“This isn’t the first self-build we’ve done,” says Craig, who previously owned and ran a building firm, which built the new house with the help of a team of sub-contractors. “Our last house was of timber-frame, timber-clad construction. We lived in that for four or five years before we sold up. Jane’s mum was ill, so we moved in with them – next door to where we are now, living there until the new house was completed.”
Craig, 52, now a technical sales specialist for an insulation company, and Jane, 55, a commercial interior designer by training, live with their two children aged 17 and 22, and Jane’s 82-year-old father, a retired pharmacist who has dementia, in the village of Teversal, near Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire.
‘Next door’ is Teversal Manor, a 17th-century Grade II listed mansion said to be the inspiration for Wragby Hall in D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Famous literary visitors included Bloomsbury Set writer Virginia Woolf. Some of the manor’s most notable residents were the Earls of Carnarvon, including the fifth Earl, who financed the ill-fated excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt in 1922.
Jane’s mother Janet died in 2017, about a year after her daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren moved in, and then John, Jane’s father, was diagnosed with dementia.
Although huge, with up to 14 bedrooms, the manor house – restored and renovated extensively by John and Janet and now being divided up and sold – has several staircases and key rooms on different levels. Therefore, it was no longer suitable for John’s needs, so the decision was made to build a new multi-generational family home.
‘Last House,’ as they named it, also needed to provide living space for Jane’s brother, who lives in Thailand but regularly visits England with his family. “John wanted to build it big enough so all of his family could come and stay,” says architect Paul Testa of HEM in Sheffield. So the Oakworth timber frame and brick-skinned detached 360 m2 house was built with John at the fulcrum, and various family members contributing to the cost.
The result is a flexible space with five/six bedrooms and a substantial multi-purpose basement. Timber frame was chosen as the build method to speed up construction and provide superlative airtightness and thermal performance.
At the heart of the house is an open-plan living/dining/kitchen area. John has his own ground-floor bedroom, ensuite and separate lounge, with easy access to the central family living/dining/kitchen space. His rooms are flexible to enable them to be used as a main suite, potentially for Craig and Jane, in the future.
There is a further bedroom on the ground floor with an ensuite, plus a separate shower room and a snug. On the first floor, three bedrooms share a bathroom and a large walk-in shower room. All these rooms are connected by a generously-proportioned mezzanine landing.
“In multi-generational living, the key thing is spaces to converge and spaces to retreat to,” says Paul. “Even in larger spaces for more communal living, the opportunity to sit apart but in the same space feels important.”
The 100 m2 basement/undercroft includes a cinema room, gym, wine store, plant-room, utility area and storage. “My daughter likes to use the cinema room as a bedroom in the height of summer as the basement maintains a constant temperature,” says Craig, who was hands-on throughout the build, even laying the carpets.
The Devonshires’ new home is built on the former kitchen gardens of the manor house. A 1930s house stood on the 0.6 acre site when they bought it at auction. “When the plot came up for sale, effectively it was a downsizing operation so we could manage my father-in-law a lot better,” Craig explains.
As the whole of Teversal village has been a conservation area for more than five decades – designated as such in 1970 – and the proposed new house is next to the manor house and its walled garden, Craig and Jane assumed that their only option would be to renovate and extend the 1930s house.
“However, we had a site meeting with the Local Conservation Officer prior to giving Paul Testa Architecture (now HEM) their brief,” says Craig. “The conservation officer said he wouldn’t be averse to replacing the original house. Instantly, we were on a positive footing with them. The only thing he said to us was that he didn’t want to see a farmyard/courtyard style development.
Craig continues: “He wanted to see the use of traditional materials and different roof heights.” He explains that after architect Paul came to site he “very quickly came back with the original concept design” which only needed a “minor reduction on the size of the single storey wing to satisfy the planners.”
Incredibly, thanks to Craig, Paul and heritage consultant Andrew Witham working carefully with Ashfield District Council planning department, permission was achieved in eight weeks, and for a house at double the footprint of the original one that stood on the site.
The design concept was to create a modern interpretation of a 19th century house form, explains Paul: “It’s an H-plan with five prominent and differently coped gables. Each gable is punctuated by different window forms, more subtle and closed feeling to the north and much more open and modern in their form to the south, overlooking the garden.”
The ‘broken’ roofscape of different heights was a planning requirement, to avoid creating a monolithic modernist ‘block’ and to tie in with the differing roof heights of other properties in the conservation area.
“The mass of the house is stepped down towards the manor to reduce its visual impact on the listed house,” Paul adds. “We also kept the architectural expression of the house more modest to the north where it faces the village and conservation area, then opened up the elevations to make best use of the southerly views and solar access.”
Brick exterior walls add strength to the insulated timber frame; this was supplemented with additional PIR insulation in the walls and the roof. Although Craig says he’s not personally a huge fan of brick, Olde English Wienerberger bricks were chosen because brick is used widely locally and is very characteristic of the conservation area. Various bonds and patterns add subtle visual features.
“The previous house that we built had quite a modern look, all painted white, sleek and clean,” says Jane, who now spends much of her time caring for her father. “This house was a bit more of an emotional response; we had just been through Covid,” she adds.
“This formed the idea for the interior. I wanted it to be more cosy, more homely, more low-key. Some of the colours we’ve used are quite dark. It’s a friendlier house, it feels completely different to the previous one.”
Some of the oak parquet flooring from the original 1930s house was repurposed – as was the structure itself, crushed onsite to provide recycled hardcore used in the landscaping. The shaker-style kitchen, panelling and brass fittings also epitomise the traditional elements of the interior style, with the backdrop of quadruple-glazed Fakro rooflights and triple-glazed Internorm windows, chosen for strength and energy efficiency, bringing in a contemporary edge.
The total build, including demolition of the existing house, worked out at £1,600 per m2, costing around £560,000 in total. However, the project was hit with unexpected costs of £10,000 to rebuild a 30 metre portion of the eastern wall, part of the Grade II listed Teversal Manor Gardens. “The previous owner of the original Last House had allowed ivy to grow unchecked for 40 years which destroyed the mortar,” Craig explains. “We carefully took our side of the wall down and rebuilt it with an approved lime mortar mix.”
Also unexpected was the cost of the basement. Craig recognised that the sloping nature of the site leant itself to the new house having an undercroft, ideal as he wanted to be able to safely store his sit-on mower and drive it straight out into the gardens. This ambition has been achieved through adding a roller shutter door. Encouraged by architect Paul, Craig and Jane agreed that it made sense to extend the undercroft to a full basement.
“We thought it was a good idea, but we got a complete shock when quotations for the work came back,” Paul admits. “It was six figures just to do the retaining structure. We thought, ‘we can’t afford that’. Fortunately, we knew a groundworker in the village who had other groundworkers working with him, so we asked him to price up the job. By doing it in-house, we cut the cost down by just over £100,000 to £25,000.”
The four metre deep hole for the basement was lined with waterproof concrete. The timber frame for the rest of the house sits on top of the inner portion of the concrete basement. To support the open-plan interior spaces internal structural steel beams come off pads at basement level, with some up to six metres high for the two storey part of the house.
Getting this element of the build right was understandably challenging, Craig says: “We had a bit of a conflict between Oakworth and the architects, it was one of those things no-one could have foreseen. The guy dealing with it at Oakworth had a heart attack. He did recover, thankfully, but there was a period of five to six weeks where communication between the architects and Oakworth was a little difficult. There was a structural element that was in the wrong place, but we got round it by bolting a steel onto the concrete wall.”
The heating demand for the house is 30 kWh/m2; the basement doesn’t need heating and neither do the bedrooms, Craig says, because thermal performance is so good. The house’s EPC rating is a high B: “We were marked down because we put in two electric boilers. One is for hot water. The other is a dedicated boiler for the underfloor heating which is barely ever on. We essentially ran out of money and couldn’t justify the huge cost of ground source or air source pump. We only heat the ground floor anyway.”
In retrospect, he says he would have added photovoltaic panels to generate some of their electricity, and wishes that solar shading had been installed to help control summer temperatures on the southern side of the house, which overlooks the garden.
On top of the budget for the house, Craig and Jane spent a further £110,000 on landscaping works, including creating a terraced garden. “When we started the whole project we wanted to work with garden designer Sue Hayward who had done a lot of garden work on Teversal Manor,” Craig says. “She had plans from an early stage. We said we wanted it terraced because it slopes down. She came up with a scheme, we took it as an overall concept, and she didn’t charge us a huge amount of money. We tweaked some of the things she suggested.”
Jane was very keen on incorporating “grassy banks” leading out from the house into the garden design, but this idea was jettisoned when it was realised that these would be huge and “end up overgrown and messy.”
Some form of heavy-duty retaining device would be required instead. Corten steel panels would have been too expensive, but driving down the motorway one day Craig found inspiration; the steel sheet piles used to hold back excavated earth during road construction. In place, filled with plants, they provide a pleasing solution, alongside steps from the terrace to the garden and the entrance to the undercroft.
Jane spends most of her time in the open-plan kitchen/dining/living area where she enjoys the view from the huge triple-glazed sliding doors: “You feel like you’re completely connected to the garden, there is all kinds of wildlife, buzzards overhead and deer in the field beyond.”
Craig likes this family-friendly space too, as well as the mezzanine landing with its comfortable seating area. Would he consider doing another self-build when family circumstances change? “ Yes, but next time it will be smaller. We’ve found a plot recently and I have talked to Paul, we shall see.”