Sibhaven is a Grade ll listed house designed in 1899, the same year that Ebenezer Howard formed Garden City Association – an enabling organization within the Garden City Movement. Today, the house and its garden have come to epitomize the movement’s idea of a healthy, well-balanced and self-sufficient living on a small scale.
The original design centred around housing the owners and their servants in one building in strictly defined areas. We re-interpreted it without loosing the historic features and created a modern home free of social hierarchy.
The project developed gradually and took nearly 15 years to complete, accompanied by Planning and Listed Building permissions at every step of the way. We first made the structure stable, retrofitted and thermally upgraded the fabric and made a home for five within only some of the larger rooms.
We then addressed the original service areas, bringing daylight into dark and underused rooms. By re-using, re-shaping and re-locating the original features we retained great majority of the listed fabric and juxtaposed it with the new of contemporary idiom and materials.
To future-proof the heritage we replaced gas with clean on-site generated energy and located all in the timber-framed and corten-clad infill. As work-from-home became a possibility, we added a light-weight timber and lime plaster studio in the garden, creating a truly self-sufficient heritage home for future.
