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Grand Designs Live: Extend to the extreme

This year’s Grand Designs Live celebrates hi-tech and low impact, from earth buildings to amazing glazing, says Sarah Lonsdale

What does the idea of "home" mean to you? Is it a quiet cocoon where you can withdraw from the hustle of the noisy world? Is it a sleek fashion statement, something you can show off at dinner parties? Or is it a utilitarian structure, within whose wipe-clean walls you can raise your children safely?

Our relationship with the roof and four walls that surround us for most of the day varies according to our psychology, whether we yearn for peace, practicality or style, says Witold Rybczynski, author of a lovely book called HOME: A Short History of an Idea (Pocket Books, 2001).

For wood turner Niall Miller and family, their handmade hemp, lime and hair extension to their Victorian cottage in woods near Enniskillen is an evolving, organic construction. “We started 20 years ago and it’s still not finished,” says Niall. “It’s part of the family – it grows and changes with us. We’re so familiar with it we know what’s behind each wall, so when we wanted to create more head height upstairs for our growing family, we knew we could just excavate the ceiling for it.”

For television script writer Susan Oudot and her novelist husband David Wingrove, their modular Islington home-office was constructed mainly off-site, put up in their garden in two days and is low maintenance and practical. “It’s a functional area where we go to write and work,” she says. “When considering extending, I thought: 'I want to write, not build’, so this was perfect.”

Our relationship with our home will determine what kind of home improvements or building work we do – from the cheap but hands-on, “low impact” project that involves getting your hands dirty, to the ultra-sleek, modern, low-maintenance bolt-on modular construction, which comes with fixtures and fittings and that can be put up in a day.

This year’s Grand Designs Live – the sideshow to the popular Channel 4 series – features both extremes in home-making, from the Low Impact Living Initiative inviting participants to get down and dirty, ramming earth, straw-bale building and planing wooden roof shingles, to The Qube’s space-age modular creations, which require the minimum of mess, intrusion and time.

Managing director of The Qube Mick Spittle is unveiling his latest creation at Grand Designs: a pre-manufactured modular home with kitchens and bathrooms pre-fitted to the customer’s demands. “Depending on planning permission, we could be installing it within four weeks,” he says.

Speed and convenience was what persuaded former Oxford lecturer Dr Chris Clifford to install a Qube in his garden while he was renovating his Edwardian semi. “I could have built a traditional brick and block garden office, but I liked the look of the Qube and it’s a joy to get a functioning building so quickly.”

He adds that the insulated walls of his Qube offer much better thermal efficiency than traditional brick ones. “In the winter when the temperature outside was -10C (14F), the Qube was still warm. The only appliance in it giving off heat was my computer, but the walls conserved all the heat.” The 3.5m x 4m Qube cost £35,000.

Modular building also comes in a more traditional New England-style beach house design, in pastel-coloured weatherboarding with integral log-burning fires. Like the Qubes, most of the manufacturing is done off-site and homes are designed and delivered within eight to 10 weeks and put up in 48 hours. Made with up-to-the-minute structurally insulated panels they incorporate energy efficient lighting systems and water-saving devices.

The latest development from modular building pioneers Eco Modular Living is beach houses, which will be available on plots overlooking Filey Bay in North Yorkshire. The two-bedroom homes will retail at £200,000.

Another twist on the “modular” theme is the glass extension, designed and made off-site and installed in a week. Incorporating glass panels, some weighing up to three-quarters of a ton, the designs by Glasspace feature ultra-insulated “heat film” glass with a U-value of 0.7 (a decent double-glazed unit has a U-value of 1.4. The lower the U-value, the less heat is escaping).

Glasspace managing director Tony De Witt says these ready-made extensions can be fitted to Victorian terraces or more modern houses and can be one, two or three floors high. Single-storey extensions cost from £15,000; taller ones can be as much as £85,000.

Shoe designer Alexei Gaylard has plumped for the opposite end of the design spectrum. He helped build his hemp, lime and turf extension in his back garden and although it is not perfect – small hairline cracks have appeared in the paintwork and there is some beading missing around the door – he loves its imperfections and last summer harvested a kilo of rocket from the roof: “You get a special kind of relationship with something you’ve been so involved with – we made the windows the shape we wanted and the walls are kind of bouncy, which I like. The rocket was a complete accident – it was just one stray plant from the turf we used to cover the roof, but it absolutely loves the lime soil, which is a leftover from making the walls.”

He adds that since the entire building was either from recycled or renewable materials, from the doors which he bought on eBay to the garden soil on the roof, he was able to keep costs down.

Alexei built his extension with the help of Will Stanwix. A “hempcrete” expert, he will be on hand at Grand Designs Live, trying to assuage people’s fear of low-impact buildings. “The hemp fibre we use is waste from the textile industry, and the finished walls also have a high thermal mass. Hempcrete buildings change temperature very slowly. If the outside temperature gets very hot, the walls soak up the heat. Then at night as it cools the walls let the heat out again.” The 3m x 5m hempcrete office costs £14,000.

I’m not sure what kind of person I am – I know a year with builders at our house nearly killed me, so a prefabricated no-fuss structure sounds wonderful. But I do like the idea of harvesting salad from my roof.