This article was originally published in issue 35 of Passive House Plus magazine.

The sale for a pre-determined price was conditional on Charles receiving planning permission on the site, which is outside of the Lewes town boundary but within the national park. He struck up a provisional verbal agreement to buy the land that was later formalised. “It suddenly struck me that we could build a house on the land and design it in a way that carried echoes of the original sheds.”Ĭharles quickly entered into a conversation with the owner who used the sheds for storage. I wouldn’t be much of a developer as it was actually the third time I’d walked past the site before I noticed two dilapidated chicken sheds in a garden,” he says. “We used to do a walk on an ancient drove road used by fisher folk to carry fresh fish from Brighton to the county town of Lewes. Then, one day back in 2013, Charles was relaxing on a walk across the Sussex Downs with a friend when his imagination was fired by a pair of disused chicken sheds a few minutes’ walk from Lewes.

Active searches for a suitable, economical plot proved futile. But not only was it prohibitively expensive, there were also restrictions on the types of developments allowed. The architect Charles Meloy – who has built the first passive house in the Sussex Downs National Park (SDNP) – dreamed for “decades” of building an affordable, sustainable house in this beautiful landscape. Standard: Passive house classic certified Site & location: Semi-rural site, Lewes, East Sussex Click here for project specs and suppliersĮnergy bills £21 per month for space heatingīuild method: Structural insulated panels ( SIPs)

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