Our Green Homes approached us to design and achieve planning permission for 10 new dwellings on a tricky site. The brief for these homes was that they should be affordable, spacious and customisable, at the same time as meeting the highest standards in terms of energy performance. We’ve designed the dwellings as a standard shell with adaptable layout options so purchasers can chose a layout to match their needs. A range of home sizes from 2 to 5 bedrooms are provided to cater for a wide range of households and create a mixed community. Our approach to meeting the developers very high sustainability goals using the Passivhaus Standard had the dual benefit of acoustically insulating the new homes from a nearby steelworks. Our design turned the constraint of a steeply sloping site into an advantage, by raising the homes above the road to increase the separation from the steelworks. This height also creates first floor bedrooms with fantastic long views. This made achieving planning for a high quality development of 10 new homes possible on a site that had previously been overlooked. We also developed a robust construction strategy, reducing the reliance on wet trades to make building these homes to a high standard possible at an affordable price.