A Green Mill Conversion

It’s not just Blue Peter presenters who are able to rustle up useful items out of old jam jars and sticky-backed plastic. MP Alan Simpson’s unusual new home has been built using recycled cardboard tubes, broken bottles, straw and various other unlikely materials, but the end result is far from shoddy.

The once derelict and unwanted building, formerly a small-scale lace mill right in the heart of Nottingham’s vibrant and historic Lace Market, is completely enclosed by other buildings and surrounded by all manner of hotels, bars and car parks — making access a logistical nightmare. This previously insignificant structure has been transformed into a contemporary and sustainable home for Alan, his French Canadian wife – the award-winning author and painter Pascale Quiviger – and their baby daughter Élie, who was born in January 2006.

Alan Simpson has been the Labour MP for Nottingham South since 1992. Born in Bootle, Liverpool in 1948, he has lived and worked in Nottingham for the past 30 years and is a leading campaigner on a wide range of issues about the environment and the economy. Voted the sexiest MP in Nottinghamshire, and dubbed by The New Statesman as ‘the man most likely to come up with the ideas’, Alan was determined to practise what he was preaching by proving that it needn’t cost an arm and a leg to breathe new life into substandard and redundant buildings.

“In the past I had looked for older houses and done them up, but nothing quite on this scale,” explains Alan, who met Pascale, 36, part way through the building project when he was temporarily living with his sister and her husband. “My plan was to find the most run-down, unpromising property that I could and turn it into an attractive, sustainable home for a realistic budget. Then a friend found this place for me, which was a real eyesore and ticked all the right boxes.” Alan paid £100,000 for the boarded-up derelict structure, which is hemmed in by other buildings and has no outdoor space. “People recoiled in horror when they walked inside and saw the knee-deep piles of pigeon droppings,” recalls Alan, who invited long-term friend and local architect Julian Marsh of marsh:grochowski to come up with some cost-effective eco solutions to the numerous problems. “He’s the most visionary and gifted architect I’ve ever come across, and has never knowingly designed a room full of right angles in his life.”

The staircase had collapsed so that Alan couldn’t even access the upper floor of the building before he bought it, and bare brick walls were all that remained of the original rhomboid-shaped structure. This has been reroofed and heavily insulated internally with Homatherm insulation slabs made from recycled wood chippings. Internal walls were constructed using a composite board formed from compressed straw, and even the sterling board flooring is more usually found boarding up broken shop windows. Roof-mounted photovoltaic cells provide electricity and a state-of-the-art WhisperGen Micro Combined Heat and Power system (the first in the UK) acts like a boiler but, ingeniously, it also drives a generator to produce a further 20% of the average household’s energy needs. Surplus energy is exported back to the National Grid — resulting in cheques from the electricity company in lieu of bills.

“Being green doesn’t have to be about wearing sandals and eating lentils — it can also be exciting.We wanted to make a feature out of the water-recycling stacks, and decided to label them so that people would know what they are,” says Alan of the two bumps protruding from either side of the landing, which have been painted with the words ‘brown’ and ‘grey’.

“Getting light into the building without losing our privacy was a big problem, and one of the solutions was to design an obscure feature window for the landing from recycled wine bottles,” he continues. “The builders said that, as a labour of love, they would make their own contribution by gathering together as many empties as they could after work on a Friday night!”

It was not possible to form any new openings in the exterior walls to the living space due to the close proximity of the neighbours, and so light steals have been built into the terrace above, with the glass top shafts lined in mirrored perspex to allow daylight to be drawn down into the previously dingy kitchen area below. To the rear of the house the same problem applied, but this time a polycarbonate rooflight was inserted, below which a sandblasted glass landing enables natural light to drop three storeys down through the stairwell.

Such clever conceits ensure that every corner of the house is brightly lit. On the ground floor the layout is predominantly open plan, with a large living/dining/ kitchen in which the structural steel supports of the original lace mill create an industrial flavour. Rearing up from this double-height space the minimal white staircase is backed by a wall of startling yet inexpensive recycled cardboard tubing — giving the impression of giant stems of fat bamboo growing uniformly up through the house.

The entire first floor is dedicated to the master bedroom suite and features a capacious steel bath, tiled in mosaics, jutting out into the sleeping area. This opens through glass doors onto a suntrap roof terrace which has been paved in tiles made predominantly from recycled glass. On the top floor, two further bedrooms and a shower room are currently used for guests, but one of these will eventually accommodate Élie when she grows old enough to leave the cot in her parents’ bedroom. By which time the house will have started to pay for itself in terms of energy savings and will, in Alan’s words, “tread lightly on the future."  

GREEN FEATURES:

• Combined heat and power system (CHP)
• PV cells
• Rainwater harvesting
• Recycled wood chippings insulation
• Marmoleum flooring
• Recycled building materials

Further Reading:

• A German Style Eco House
• Eco House Design
• Saving Energy