Following the fine tradition of Responsible Building
Lewie's Croft was always going to be a sustainable, responsible build: you don’t work with Stuart Bagshaw otherwise, and you certainly don’t try and get planning permission in a protected area of the Highlands if you’ve a high-impact house in mind.
Naturally our ultimate dream is a passive home: low on environmental pressure, costs and maintenance. But it’s fair to say the rest of the world isn’t entirely caught-up with that idea, so right from the start we committed to offset as much as we could through recycling original material; using local resources and labour; living on-site to reduce transport and increase efficiency, and even repurposing stuff we’d had lying around for years, just waiting for its chance to shine.
- We built Lewie's Croft’s road from crushed and fractured Torridon sandstone dug out during the long, slow process of accessing the original Black House.
- The first survey established the ruined croft wasn’t fit for restoration, so we carefully dismantled it, stored the original stone and incorporated into the design of the new house.
- Our groundworks were reliably messy, but even in the depths of mud-bound misery we were savvy enough to save the peat, stone and rubble dug up, for later use, and very handy it proved too.
- The rear corner of Lewie's Croft is built almost entirely out of stone repurposed from the original 18th century Black House.
- The biggest stone lintel in the croft is actually a massive piece of granite we’d had tucked away in the Strathearn warehouse for over a decade, just in case. It’s not Torridon sandstone, but by some happy chance, it’s almost exactly the same colour. It was clearly meant to be.
- We opted to manufacture the croft windows from durable, stable and sustainable Accoya (acetylated plantation pine) which, when painted black, also absorbs solar gain and shouldn’t require repainting or maintenance for a number of years.
- A customised timber frame for the croft was constructed by Strathearn in our Perth workshop. Which is not as counter-intuitive as it seems from a responsible build angle, since it allowed us to put an extra 50mm depth in the frame for insulation, bringing Louis one step closer to the passive house ideal.
- We installed an air-source heat pump to run the underfloor heating and generate hot water for the entire house. It is incredibly effective and our energy bills are incredibly low - win win!