Inside the £256,000 energy-efficient home near York that people travel to see
Searching for a way to build an affordable home in North Yorkshire led two young distillery founders to opt for a timber kit HebHome, and now they love it so much they even host guided tours.
“We enjoy it, we take an hour out, make our visitors a cup of tea, show them round,” says owner Chris Jaume, co-owner of the Cooper King whisky and gin distillery in Sutton-the-on-Forest near York. “It’s mostly just [for people] getting a feel for it, having a look, assessing the quality, which you can tell straight away. The most frequent questions are about the build process, cost, and planning permission.”
Although HebHomes has built hundreds of buildings across the UK in the last 25 years, this is one of only three homes open for tours in England.
Meeting at Newcastle University, Chris, 39 and his wife, Dr Abbie Jaume, 40, qualified as an architect and molecular scientist respectively, but in 2014, following their desire to escape the ‘rat race’, they bought one-way tickets to Australia.
They met Bill Lark, known as the godfather of Tasmanian premium whisky – the island state of the Commonwealth of Australia has a global reputation for producing some of the very best – and made a life-changing decision. To go back to England, and set up their own sustainable distillery, crowdfunding to finance the venture.
The first gin still was fired up in 2018, and the whisky still in 2019. Also open for tours on Saturdays and Wednesdays, the distillery supplies spirits to a number of notable Yorkshire businesses including Tommy Banks’ restaurants, Skosh restaurant in York, the Swinton Estate and Castle Howard.
“Meanwhile, we lived partly in a 1970s caravan on site with no hot water and no functioning bathroom, partly with Abbie’s parents who live next to us,” Chris explains.
Now three generations live happily together; Abbie and Chris have an 11-month-old son, Theo.
After travelling to Scotland to visit one kit home company’s show-home, which they dismissed as not much improvement on their caravan, Abbie’s mother Pauline showed them a HebHomes advertisement in a magazine.
Through speaking to the company’s director, Alasdair Stephens, on Zoom calls, Chris and Abbie became convinced that this was the route they wanted to take.
Their home, built for a total of £256,000, on a plot that cost £10,000, is of super-energy efficient, highly insulated timber frame construction, shipped down from the company’s Scottish headquarters and built on site.
“We got the slab [foundation] poured here, and I helped set out all the insulation,” Chris explains. “Monday morning, three joiners left Scotland at 4am and got to us by 8am and by the Wednesday evening the entire shell was up, all the windows and doors and the membrane were fitted. We had a wind and watertight building up in less than 72 hours. I’ve never seen anything go up so quickly and efficiently.”
With his architectural background, Chris project-managed the build, which took 68 weeks in total, from the start of groundworks to the move-in date, Christmas 2022. Chris and Abbie put the roof on themselves and decorated throughout, Chris’s father, a furniture maker, built the kitchen, and a local company supplied the engineered oak flooring “with a lovely neighbourhood discount”.
Chris says he had to swallow his professional procedures – putting out work such as plumbing and electrics to tender – and trust recommended local tradesmen to do a good job: “No-one filled out any tender documents, but that’s how it happens here.”
He admits this was daunting, but the project came in at 20 per cent under budget. The house is designated by HMRC as a ‘caretaker property’, as its on the site of the distillery.
“Only an employee of Cooper King distillery can live in the house,” Chris explains. “We are not planning to move obviously, but the layout has to be flexible so it can be lived by whoever the caretaker might be. We also had to keep an eye on costs – we had a self-build business mortgage from NatWest – so for instance, we couldn’t have gone and bought a bespoke kitchen that might have cost £60,000. We just had to be careful with how we spent funds.”
The 84 sqm house has two bedrooms, a generous open-plan kitchen/living/dining space, a bathroom and a utility room with a WC.
All power is electric, with an Octopus Energy direct debit of only £90 a month, which also covers the EV charger. A 5kw solar power unit earns money over the summer, and energy is stored with a 10 kw battery. There is just one small 2kw heater in the main living space and a 1 kw heater in each bedroom, and a space-saving Sunamp Thermino ‘heat battery’ for hot water.
Chris says the only downside is that everything is reliant on electricity and wifi: “If you have a power cut, you lose everything and everything resets.
"There are some huge perks of living in a super-insulated modern home with everything connected to the grid. But I definitely spend more time than I considered having to reboot things, re-entering passwords and trying to problem-solve the tech side, but that’s just modern life I think.”