Native Architects, York
01904 656133 |
01904 656133 |
Mr & Mrs Bramley contacted Native in 2017 to design new accommodation at their established award-winning holiday accommodation at Manor Farm, Kelfield. The services Native provided started with the design and obtaining Planning Permission for the development . Following this stage, we completed the technical stages of obtaining Building Regulation approval, Building Contractor selection and support for the project whilst on site.
The farm diversified into tourism in 2008 by converting three of their old cottages and barns into five-star eco self-catering luxury holiday lets, ‘Dovecote Barns’. This project won awards for Green Tourism, including the Green Tourism Gold Status. The cottages are all heated by a single biomass boiler that also supplies the hot water for each cottage, whilst electricity is produced using 118 photovoltaic panels feeding into the national power grid. There is electric vehicle charging available for guests use.
Our brief was to remodel and extend the extension of the old granary into additional bedroom accommodation and a function space, known as the Grand Barn and Long Hall. On the ground floor the ‘Long Hall’ has been extended to allow it to be a flexible multi-purpose entertainment space with 100 square metres suitable for occasion dining, exhibitions, yoga retreats, and weddings with an additional 209 square metres of accommodation. On the first floor is ‘The Grand Barn’ with four double bedrooms all with en-suite accommodation.
Native designed the ‘Grand Barn’ and ‘Long Hall’ to be an exemplar in energy efficiency, using natural, renewable and sustainable insulation products such as wood fibre and cork ensuring the building is highly insulated and ensuring the indoor air quality is good, free from Volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, which are gases that are emitted into the air from products such as paints and insulation materials such as polyisocyanurates found in more conventional insulation boards. Some VOCs are harmful by themselves, and some can react with other gases to form other air pollutants.
In holiday accommodation having a safe and natural environment has great advantages. The windows are fitted with high performance glass and the building is also connected to the central biomass boiler, heating that uses sustainable and natural materials rather than oil.
The adaptive re-use of old buildings particularly agricultural buildings in the landscape, with sympathetic restoration, using ethically sourced building materials, traditional craftsmanship and low carbon technology, can offer a new economic future by continuing to make a positive contribution to the countryside economy and locking up the embodied carbon captured in their building materials indefinitely.
Dovecote Barn holiday accommodation shares the same credentials as our own award-winning offices, The Granary at Lingcroft Farm, York, sympathetically converted from an 18th-century granary into a modern rural workspace.