Chalkstream House

A family home deeply informed by the rare chalk-stream ecology of the Hertfordshire green belt. This project seeks to restore the unmanaged and overgrown landscape which has been in the client’s family for decades.

The new landscape will retain a sense of wilderness allowing the house to rise out of a kind of ‘lost landscape’ fulfilling the client’s ambition o create an environmental “lifetime” home using hyper-local materials.

Significant biodiversity enhancements include a new wildlife meadow, orchard and scrub development, along with new ecological ponds. Whilst wildlife interventions include integrated bat and swift boxes in the building fabric, and invertebrate box on one of the retained trees. These interventions will result in a biodiversity net gain of 33.27% in Habitat Units on site.

Chalkstream House was granted planning permission under Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) in 2026. The home is designed to be a whole life zero carbon home, meaning it will remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it creates over its lifespan.