Right from the beginning, our architectural stone services and technical drawing support was on hand to work with Simon and his structural designers. Their goal was to create a beautiful Edwardian house with the highest environmental standards – a period eco-house.
The starting point was the house that existed on the site. Built in 1907, it had significant heat loss issues. The best way to address this was to insulate the brick fabric of the existing building externally and render over. This also meant that the house could be seamlessly integrated with the new-build, doubling the size of the original property.
Building regulations required that window and door surrounds had to be thermally broken to prevent thermal bridging – there needed to be insulation separating the external stone from the internal stone. This wasn’t something we had encountered before. In traditional stone areas like Stamford, local authorities tend to accept solid stone as a traditional building method but in regions like Sussex and Warwickshire there’s more call for this application.
This was a complex project so we were happy to offer our expertise and navigate Simon through the design process. We also put together a team of stone fixers to install the surrounds on site and source the fixings.
All the windows were fashioned from Clipsham limestone – there were over 100 window casements and each casement used 10 individual pieces of stone.
Designing thinner sections can have a significant impact on stone that is used in a traditional manner – and in particular, elements such as window surrounds where introducing a thermal break can easily render the stone structurally unstable.
Once the build was complete, we supplied walling, steps and Cathedral Gold paving stone for the landscaping, even milling the sandstone paving down to 20mm to allow the mechanical pool cover to retract over the pool.
Seeing a project through from start to finish is always incredibly satisfying: we successfully met the brief of keeping to an ecologically sound arts and crafts design – the results speak for themselves.
Simon was delighted with our contribution and has received many compliments about his beautiful home.
Stamford Stone produce the finest quality English limestone at a price that is surprisingly affordable. As a novice self-builder whose architects and contractors were not very familiar with this material, I needed particular help with the design and detailed specification.
Stamford Stone did this work expertly and efficiently and I felt that my hand had been held throughout the process.
