Six appeal

FLUORESCENT jacket catching in the spring sunshine, Sally Marshall stands on her building site. It is a very ordinary-looking building site.

There’s plenty of mud, plenty of puddles, plenty of plant and plenty of noise.

But this site also has plenty of potential, because these are the first “Level Six” houses to be built in County Durham and probably anywhere in the country.

By 2016, the Government stipulates that all new homes will have to be built this way, with maximum regard for the environment.

But this does not mean that Sally’s four detached executive homes on the edge of a former pit village are going back to rudimentary basics to cut energy use and emissions.

“I’m not going down the road of living in a cave or a tent and getting water from a pump,”

she says, her 4x4 car parked out the front. “This is a house that looks like a house. There’s no compromise on style and no compromise on efficiency.

“Ecobuilds have got an image of being way out that alienates 80 per cent of people. The question with this project is can you live a sustainable lifestyle without compromising modern comforts?”

Because our homes account for 27 per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions, the Government introduced the Code for Sustainable Homes in 2007. All new builds are rated against the code: most struggle to reach Level Three; none has yet reached the top – Level Six.

The code measures things such as the house’s pollution output, its water usage, its efficiency.

For example, Ms Marshall’s brochure says it will cost only £100-a-year to heat one of her houses, overlooking the River Wear in a former farmyard in Great Lumley, near Chesterle- Street.

“It’s actually £50 a year,” says Ms Marshall who, for four days a week is a music and performing arts teacher, “but no one believes me, so we put down £100.”

Level Six dictates that the home must generate more power than it can use – the surplus can be sold to the National Grid. Ms Marshall will install solar panels and a biomass boiler, to burn burning locally-sourced wood. Plus each home will have a Quiet Revolution.

“It is the sexiest of wind turbines,” enthuses Ms Marshall. “It’s beautiful. It’s white. It isn’t a propellor, it’s a vertical sphere with a number of curved plates so it can catch the wind from many directions as it spins around.

“And it is a lot of money: about £40,000 each.”

The design of a Level Six house is also taken into account by the code. Ms Marshall’s houses deliberately face south, with their large glass atriums – inspired by Seaham Spa with coated argon-filled double glazing that allows the heat in, but not out – harvesting the warmth of the sun, at any time of year. The atriums allow the heat to rise from downstairs – a process assisted by a ventilation system that moves air from a hot room into a cooler one – and so there will be no need for heating in the bedrooms.

Another design feature is an outside covered area to encourage residents to put up a washing line. “Tumble driers are not very economic,”

says Ms Marshall, 43. “I have lived without one for four years.”

Such features help people re-engineer their lives. “We have built in a lot of storage space because I don’t shop,” she says. “I will go to a wholesalers once every three months, use the village shops for day to day things, or it’s organically grown and delivered to the door.”

The code also measures the greeness of the construction of the building. The builders at High Farm – GYM Construction, of Meadowfield – arrive each morning in a shared van rather than by individual car; there’s no skip on site as there’s no waste; the materials either come from as close to home as possible – stone from Staindrop, for example – or are as green as can be.

Another example: the homes are constructed from structural integrated panels (Sips).

Sips are made of woodshavings compressed with glue under heat to create a panel strong enough to support a roof. All last week’s offcuts are returned to the factory in Glasgow by the lorry that brought this week’s load, to be recycled into next week’s.

James Taylor, senior planning officer at Durham County Council, who assisted with the project, says: “Level Six aims to achieve zero carbon emissions for the dwelling with the introduction of micro-renewable technologies.

The High Farm development is unique in County Durham and is the first of its kind to get off the ground and strive for this level.”

However, that doesn’t mean that Ms Marshall has become obsessive about being greener than green. Of course, all rainwater will be collected and used, but Ms Marshall, whose family will live in one of the homes, is sniffy at the prospect of the residents’ human waste hanging about on site.

“It’ll go into the mains system,” she says.

“We haven’t got any reed beds or composters – that’s a bit too hairy for me, too open-toed sandals.”

Ms Marshall, whose husband is an associate dean at Northumbria University and whose 16-year-old son is training to be a chef, has been property developing for 20 years, although this is her biggest project.

“It’s a bit like childbirth,” she says. “The worst bits get blocked from your memory because they are so awful. That’s where the television programme Grand Designs makes a mistake because they make it look so easy, people don’t like to come across as struggling, and when it comes to the finance, people are just lying.”

The High Farm houses each have an asking price of £695,000.

“I had one guy view who was very flash and he never asked about the environmental side, just where’s the TV room,” she says. “It has to be somebody who has a certain amount of knowledge and understanding of why we are doing this.”

She estimates that reaching Level Six will have cost at least £40,000 a house. Double that when you add a Quiet Revolution – an awful lot in a credit crunch, particularly if you are a builder trying to create affordable housing.

Ms Marshall says the photovoltaic panels that create solar energy will, even by the Government’s target of seven years, be too expensive to be cost-effective.

“I’m not waving placards but I do believe that people will have to start taking their use of resources seriously,” she says. “I’m doing this project just for the challenge, to see if it can be done and, at the moment, it is wavering in the balance because it is costing so much money.”

As the world continues to warm up, when will environmentally sustainable living become financially sustainable?