Sustainable family home created with bold vision of artist homeowner
Blessed with the surrounding natural beauty of two National Parks, a sensitively and sustainably designed new family home, located in the heart of Hampshire, has now been completed.
The collaboration between the homeowner – famous illustrator/artist, Jennie Maizels, and the award-winning Snug Architects, combines bold interior design with an elegant facade built with Kebony, a global leader in the production of sustainable modified wood.
Characterised by a contextual modern design, Kebony was chosen to clad the property, carefully blending with the home’s verdant countryside surrounding to create a beautiful family home befitting of its unique location.
Snug Architects chose to design two pitched roof structures connected by a single-storey glass pavilion, making clear reference to the vernacular rural forms seen in the wider context. Wrapping around all the walls and over the pitched roof, Kebony wood, which develops a unique silver-grey patina over time, echoes the silver tones of the surrounding birch trees and contributes to the stylish, clean exterior design of the property.
Paul Bulkeley at Snug Architects commented: “The project is sympathetic to its setting and sits harmoniously in its context. Kebony’s hard-wearing and sustainable characteristics made it the perfect choice for the cladding, whilst its knotty appearance is an accurate reflection of the mature trees in the context.”
For illustrator and artist Jennie Maizels, it was vital that the interiors reflected her passion for bold design and creative flair. The interior is bright and full of colour, injecting life and energy into the new build. To realise her vision for her family home, Jennie worked with pioneering companies who have dared to be different, introducing splashes of colour to their products, ranging from fabulous bright sinks from Villeroy & Boch, to coral pink bathroom cabinets from Duravite.
For the exterior, the wood cladding was chosen to not only add a unique aesthetic to the home, but for its sustainability credentials and for having the durability class of a hardwood, with a natural textured, tactile quality.
Developed in Norway, Kebony’s revolutionary technology is an environmentally friendly process which modifies sustainably sourced softwoods by heating the wood with furfuryl alcohol – an agricultural by-product. By polymerising the wood’s cell wall, the softwoods permanently take on the attributes of tropical hardwood including high durability, hardness and dimensional stability. Kebony’s environmental credentials and its natural weathered aesthetic made it the ideal material for the exterior cladding of family home.
Jennie Maizels added: “Collaborating with Snug Architects to create our new family home has been a passion project, and my daughters and I are really delighted with the final product! Our new home has been made particularly special to us through the use of fantastic products and materials like Kebony, which provides a beautiful and timeless exterior finish and really completes the home’s natural aesthetic.”