Draughty barn transformed into one of Scotland’s greenest homes
August 28 2018
Thomas Robinson Architects have transformed a draughty barn into one of the greenest homes in the country after securing Scotland’s first EnerPHit certification.
Specially conceived for retrofitted or renovated properties the Passivhaus certification for Auchineden takes account of the different challenges to energy efficiency found within older style buildings.
Architect Tom Robinson wrote: “Achieving compliance for this building was not straight forward and many of the obvious measures that could have been done such as making the south facing openings larger were not available to us. However, we’ve done it and we and the client is exceptionally pleased with the result.”
Certification demands an exacting degree of fastidiousness during the construction process, from documenting airtightness tests to retaining delivery notes for doors and windows while maintaining a detailed photographic record of the construction.
There are currently an estimated 1,000 Passivhaus buildings in the UK, of which 56 are EnerPHit projects.
4 Comments
The only negative is that there doesn't appear to be any internal shots showing the quality of space delivered or any floor plans (or notes on the costs)
I suppose that as the projects featured in the pages of UR are the most notable in Scotland, there is an expectation that the buildings are designed and built to a high standard. Most of the schemes have large budgets and are by national practices. It’s not a website for the general workaday dross (for that, see the very funny ‘BadBritishArchitecture’ blog ).
Accordingly the bar is set high. A lot of projects slip by without comment, either because they’re uninteresting or just perfectly adequate. Quite a few surpass the high levels of design expected and do get applauded accordingly (which is nice).
But some are just plain bad and deserve to be called out as such. We don’t need the emperor’s new clothes here, and the ‘circle-jerk’ (as it has been referred to) of architects all telling each other how great they are does little for the profession.
The above doesn’t apply to this particular project by the way – it looks like a thoroughly interesting technical exercise.
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The fact that this ambitious, attractive, progressive and ultimately successful project has zero comments or interest on UR is typical of the norm. Generally it seems that people on this site are not interested in Architecture, they are interested in criticising/trolling architects. Its a sad statement that on this site the theme seems to be "if you don't have anything nasty to say, don't say anything at all", rather than the opposite we were all taught as children.