Building a home is a learning process, and one novice self-builder couple came top of the class
WORDS REBECCA FOSTER PHOTOGRAPHY ADAM CARTER
After living happily in their traditional Cotswolds stone house for 20 years, retirees Kate and Alistair Macduff were ready for a change. ‘We wanted something modern, easy to look after and smaller,’ Kate explains.
They came up with the idea of constructing a new home on the 0.75-acre piece of land in front of their house after a neighbour applied for planning permission to build in their own, smaller, garden.
This was an ideal solution as Kate, 64, and Alistair, 78, were keen to remain in the village they’d grown to love over the past two decades. ‘We owned the perfect plot, and our road is one of the only flat routes in quite a hilly village,’ says Kate. ‘Our neighbours are great too.’
She began searching for an architect in 2018. ‘I was passionate about the project, so Alistair effectively left it to me,’ Kate says. A local estate agent put her in touch with two architecture practices, each of which developed a concept design for the house. Kate was drawn to a scheme by architect Grant Hitchcock-Yoo. Allowing for the slope of the site, the L-shaped plan has a single-storey wing at the back and a two-storey section at the front. ‘It is modern and original, but not stark,’ says Kate.
She and Grant set to refining the details through several design iterations before applying for planning permission in June 2019. Although the house is in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and two houses away from a conservation area, consent came through without any issues. ‘The houses on our road are in different architectural styles, which helped our case,’ Kate explains.
On selling their home to fund the project and breaking ground on the new-build, they moved in with Kate’s mother, 10 miles away. ‘I loved visiting the site and watching the house evolve, from the pouring of the foundations to the installation of our staircase,’ says Kate.
The insulated concrete formwork foundations support a timber-frame construction. Translating the detailed architectural drawings to meet the requirements of the framing system threw up a few technical issues, something that may have been avoided by bringing the supplier on board much earlier. ‘The thickness of the frame meant that the window and door openings were slightly differen
