Max Fordham's house is "simple and practical" and mostly all natural.
There has long been skepticism about Passive House, or Passivhaus in the original German. Passivhaus expert Monte Paulsen listed some of the misconceptions in a Green Building Advisor article a few years ago, including "too expensive" or "too stuffy" or "too complicated" or "too rigid" or "too ugly". But in the years since it has become clear that none of these are true, and a lot of those skeptics have been won over.
© Fordham house/ Passive House PlusAccording to Jason Walsh, writing in Passive House Plus, physicist and engineer Max Fordham used to be a bit of a skeptic and critic of the Passive House concept. But he independently developed his own approach to building energy efficient buildings, and it was looking more and more like Passive house. Fordham tells Passive House Plus that ventilation is the source of "the worst excesses of the building industry." He then goes on about one of my regular gripes, radiant underfloor heating:
© Fordham house/ Passive House Plus
Justin Bere, architect for the house, explains a bit of Max Fordham's conversion:
One very interesting thing about this house is that it is on three levels, and there doesn't appear to be much of a concession to the fact that Max Fordham is in his eighties, other than the stairs do not have winders in them. Jason Walsh writes that "there is a focus on accessibility; it is possible to live entirely on the ground floor, for example, while cork flooring provides some safety against falls." And the bathroom door on the ground floor opens outwards, but that is about it, and it is a tight ground floor suite.
© Fordham house/ Passive House Plus
But it is a very small mews site and Fordham almost seems to be treating this more as a physics experiment than a house. He tells Passive House Plus:
© Fordham house/ Passive House Plus
Readers should visit Passive House Plus for the technical details, but the house hits only .38 air changes per hour (PH limit is 0.6) and costs almost nothing to heat. It is built with natural and renewable materials including wood fibre insulation and wood cladding. There is a little electric heater coil in the Heat Recover Ventilator and a heat pump domestic hot water system.
One of the reasons that there used to be so many of the misconceptions about Passive House is that there really wasn't a lot of experience with them. That has now changed. The builder, Bow Tie Construction, notes that some architects still don't understand it.
When builders, engineers, architects and clients all understand what they are doing and why, most of those problems and extra costs will just disappear.
Read more in Passive House Plus.
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