In the final session of the day, chaired by Trevor Ivory of Howes Percival Solicitors, the motion was that ‘Passivhaus Should be the Norfolk Standard’. The motion was supported by Andrew Savage, Director of Broadland Housing Association, whose 250-apartment Carrow Road project is reported to be the largest in the UK currently being designed to Passivhaus standards. Matt was asked to oppose the motion.

‘In a room packed full of Passivhaus enthusiasts that was always going to be a tough gig’, explains Matt, ‘but I’m always up for a challenge!’

Matt tried to convince the audience that despite its many obvious short-comings, the existing Code for Sustainable Homes gives a good holistic framework for sustainable design, in contrast to Passivhaus’s more narrow focus on energy efficiency, and that by the time the Code is fully implemented in 2016 its energy-efficiency component will be broadly comparable with the Passivhaus standard. He concluded by suggesting that the way forward would be to build the powerful Passivhaus design-protocol into the Code (or at least give it ‘Deemed to Comply’ status), rather than introducing it in parallel at a local level.

The motion was carried…but by a respectably narrow margin!

Matt has written more over on his blog Ruralise.

The next event – PKN Norwich Vol.#4 – will take place on June 21st at the Sainsbury Centre, as part of the RIBA’s national Love Architecture event; attendance highly recommended!

The site lies just outside the town’s development boundary adjacent to the Toll’s Meadow nature reserve. It had been used as a builder’s yard for decades, and the opportunity to prevent intensification of this potentially unsightly use was a key part of the planning committee’s decision to approve the plans.

Three quarters of the site area will be naturalistically landscaped as a visual extension of Toll’s Meadow, with the pitched roofs, red brick and dark timber cladding of the contemporary-styled house providing a new tidy backdrop to the green-space, against the skyline of the town beyond.

In a characteristically bold move, Abel Homes have opted to base the look of the new homes on the highly successful Hus22 project in Drayton, also designed by Matt Wood while a director at Conran&Partners, in collaboration with Lucas Hickman Smith. As Tony Abel explains in the EDP this week:

‘We wanted these new homes to stand out from other homes which are being built in the town, both in terms of their look and their livability and in particular their sustainability and energy-efficiency. I was born in this town and I want to be able to look back and be proud of what we have achieved here.’

A planning application for Phase 2 will be submitted in April, with construction due to start in the Autumn.

The Grade 2 listed building at the entrance to the Holkham Estate is indeed ancient. The original core of the building is shown on the earliest known map of the area from 1590, but its appearance today, including the spectacular set of Elizabethan-style chimneys, is mostly the result of a heavy re-modelling in the 1885. The new hotel rooms will replace a retail unit, which in its turn replaced hotel rooms that had occupied the building for most of the twentieth century. The conversion work will leave the outside of the Ancient House virtually unchanged, and the internal layouts work very closely with the existing fabric.

Construction work is expected to start later this year.