A Self-built Bungalow

There's an old saying that `you can't keep a good man down for long'. In 1995 self-build author David Snell lost everything when a building firm he had guaranteed went bust.

Aged 50, he was left with just £30 to his name and together with wife Linda, decided to decamp from Kent to a rented semi in the Forest of Dean to start a new life. The receivers even took his pension, but what they couldn't take was his wealth of experience in the self-build industry: knowledge he put to use to turn his life around.

Ten years later and far wiser for the lessons that bankruptcy taught him, David has a career as one of the UK's leading self-build pundits and lives in a £390,000 bungalow in Gloucestershire on which he has only a small mortgage. Quite a comeback by anyone's standards, especially for a maverick character who left school at 15 without a certificate to his name and fondly admits that he can't remember much of the 1960s.

David Snell has built ten houses for himself and Linda. Every single one of them has been called Imagine, after the great John Lennon track: not terribly imaginative, H&R suggests - "Except," David protests, "every single one of them is in a different county!" If anyone qualifies for the soubriquet `serial self-builder', it is David Snell, yet as he points out, over a period of three and a half decades, it amounts to only one build every three and a half years! But with rental accommodation between each house, goodness knows how often this couple have moved home.

They must have an account with Pickfords. However, every time Linda and David move they claim that they sell every piece of furniture together with the house, then pack their suitcases and travel light. "It's instinct," says David. "We are both the offspring of nomadic forces families and spent our childhoods in the far-flung reaches of the then colonies and dominions, never staying anywhere for very long." It is little wonder then that their latest self-build - a home that anyone else would be content to settle down in for life - still hasn't brought out the instinct to put down roots. "I love this house just as it is," says David. "I would like to stay here, but if we were to build again - just one more time - we won't have a mortgage. And Linda has decided that the kitchen is too big anyway!"

The kitchen is indeed vast, combining a dining and light-filled living area, but it is not really the size of the kitchen that is the problem, says Linda. "It's a very long walk from the oven to the sink and I could really do with a work surface somewhere in between to put down hot pans," she complains. "Beverley Pemberton, who designed the house - an old friend of ours who also happens to be Chief Designer at self-build package supplier Design & Materials Ltd. - put an island in the kitchen design. But David took it out. He felt it was clutter!"

"She doesn't like the vaulted ceilings in the living room either," adds David of another feature that he insisted on. "It just isn't cosy, especially when David is away. The room echoes and the window is too high to clean inside," says Linda, referring to the vast four-metre-high wall of glazing in the living room. "You don't clean it," is David's riposte. "I pay the window cleaners to do that!"

These are only minor grumbles about a house that is a huge success. The property manages to combine a traditional exterior with light-filled, open plan interiors and one of the most successful bungalow layouts that H&R has seen.

The big challenge with single storey living is to create a clear distinction between `private' bedroom accommodation and `public' living space. This has been achieved by creating a second, inner hallway, reached via the main entrance hall. "I hate bungalows that have a bad mix of living and sleeping," says David. "I wanted a main hall that is spacious - big, light and airy - double height and features rooflights and sidelights. The inner hall I wanted to be an inner space with access to all of the bedrooms. This could have been very dark, but Beverley came up with the idea of a light tower - designed like the bell tower in an old school, to bring in light from above. It has been very successful."

"We wanted the house to look like an old schoolhouse," explains David. "We wanted lots of light coming in from several directions- particularly in the main living rooms. And I wanted a living room with a vaulted ceiling because it created an interesting-shaped room - like an upturned boat - and a cathedral window, just like in an old schoolroom. I love the fact that the living room is big enough for the furniture to sit in the middle, so you can walk behind it. I've never had that before!"

Unusually, the house features no utility room. "We didn't bother with a utility room because I think it is a waste of space," says David. "Instead we used all of the space to have the huge kitchen breakfast room with a living area. It has huge light and space and I just love it - although Linda hates it." In compensation for a utility room, the design includes a very large cupboard in the downstairs WC in which they can hide the vacuum cleaner and other household accoutrements. There is also an external store integral to the property which houses the oil-fired condensing boiler.

As you might expect from a leading self-build expert, the build was entirely uneventful. "We used subcontractors last time we built, but this time we chose to use a builder," explains David, who initially planned to use timber frame construction but later switched to masonry after discovering that all of the frame manufacturers were so busy they couldn't deliver for three months. "I realised we could get the shell built and weathertight in less time using rendered blockwork on a brick plinth," says David. "The contractor built the weathertight shell for around £83,000, including the detached garage that houses my office, on a supply-and-fix basis. I then separately contracted with the same builder to do a second fix contract on a labour-only basis, so I could supply all of the materials myself."

David is a firm believer in mixing expensive and cheap fixtures and fittings to create an expensive look on a budget. In the kitchen they have used inexpensive contract quality kitchen units, but have combined them with beautiful Chinese granite worktops. The entire kitchen, with appliances, hob and cooker hood cost £8,500. "I do not agree with paying for expensive wall tiles," states David. "In the kitchen, however, you use so few tiles on the splashbacks that it doesn't really matter." His reasoning suggests they spent rather more here than he would have liked - however, in the bathrooms they have used plain white tiles that cost just £4.71/m², offset with a band of decorative tiles at an extravagant £1.25 each. On the bathroom floors they splashed out with marble floor tiles at 12/m².

"Most of the ground floor of the house is laid with Portuguese floor tiles," says David. "In the winter it is very quick to heat up thanks to underfloor heating, whilst in the summer, it remains cool, just like in a Mediterranean villa. Underfloor heating is a fabulous thing to have. It probably cost me around £2,000 extra and costs around £1,200 a year to run. I leave it on all year round, and it takes the chill off the floor on a cold morning. With good controls why should you bother switching it off? I love the ambience that underfloor heating gives in the rooms. Everywhere is exactly the same temperature and it is always comfortable. Even if it cost me three times as much I would still love it. I love the fact that there are no radiators - there is no clutter or any dust traps, and so the house is modern and easy to keep clean. I hate skirting boards and architrave for the same reason, it's just somewhere to catch dust.

"We wanted clean modern lines in our open plan layout and so we have simply turned the tiles up the walls in place of skirting, to protect the plaster. Where there is carpet we have used upturned architrave. I also hate coving, so we have a clean joint, with clean lines. To achieve this you have to use scrim to prevent cracks between the walls and ceilings."

In just one purchase and two self-builds, David and Linda have managed to rebuild their lives from nothing in less than eight years. Their timing has been fortunate in that house price inflation was on their side, but a great deal of their success is down to David's expertise in getting the optimum out of each site. They had a couple of lucky breaks with the plots they found, but as David says, "it's strange, the more effort I put into searching for good sites, the luckier I get. It's a good lesson for all would-be self-builders."

Further reading:

• A Spacious Single-storey Self-build
• A Half Price Bungalow
• Read David Snell's Blog