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Commissioned by social housing provider, North Hertfordshire Homes, sustainable architects Cole Thompson Anders designed ‘Tomorrow’s Garden City’ so that primary rooms face south or west to maximise the use of natural light. Air source heat pumps provide low energy heating to the apartments while rain water harvesting, low flush toilets and spray taps reduce the water consumption of the properties.
All of the homes feature predominantly flat roofs, some of which are green roofs. In addition, each roof design features a south facing sloped section, which accommodates either solar or photovoltaic panels.
Keeley Hale, development project manager at North Hertfordshire Homes commented: “The feedback we’ve had is unanimous in its praise. The residents we’ve spoken to say their homes are really warm and comfortable; they’re very pleased with them.”
Natural Building Techniques’ (NBT) Pavawall and Pavaroof systems were chosen for the building envelope because of their airtight values while the thermal mass of the systems means that the dwellings will benefit from effective protection against summertime overheating.
The Pavawall system comprises a continuous layer of high performance woodfibre boards installed on the outside of the timber frame structure. The woodfibre boards are manufactured from 95% wood waste, which itself comes from trees from sustainably-managed forests.
The U-values for the walls and roofs of the properties are 0.13 W/m2K and 0.13 W/m2K respectively. Airtightness tests undertaken on the properties returned impressive figures of under 3m3/hr/m2@50Pa, greatly outperforming the Building Regulations’ requirement of under 10m3.
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