In building circles, timber- frame construction is the new black. And Cosmo Lloyd’s new home — constructed to show just what you can do with a wooden frame — is pure couture, designed with a gimlet eye for detail and no regard for cost.
There’s no evidence here of normal life, no sign of cooking, reading or even sitting, and this in a place with not one but two fine kitchens and a vast sitting room with views across a Welsh valley to a 19th-century viaduct.
The balcony that overlooks the double-height living area would be ideal for a library or a gym, but it’s quite bare. In two years, Lloyd hasn’t had the opportunity, inclination or need to furnish it.
The walls, on the other hand, have been painted three times to get the shade exactly right — and in a house of 3,488sq ft, that’s a lot of work and a lot of paint — but nobody has bothered to hang any pictures. What could be more pleasing to the eye than a well-built wall?
Lloyd, a father of two who lives here alone, is a builder, and a busy one. Most people expecting a visit from a newspaper will at least make their bed and pick up damp towels. They are keen to show visitors round their lovely homes. Not Lloyd. The only thing he thinks to show is an “I” beam, the building part — and, at 300mm, it is twice as thick as normal ones — that makes all this possible.
Timber-frame construction is all he wants to talk about. “It’s the building of the future,” he says. “Building regulations are getting tighter and the easy way to achieve it is with timber.” He builds a persuasive argument: not only do timber frames allow you to bung up something watertight and wind-proof in five days, but you can do it using sustainable resources to produce an astoundingly energy-efficient home.
With a timber-frame wall, you can leave a big gap for insulation and stuff it with lamb’s wool, straw or blown paper if you will. Glass-fibre wool will leave your new home snugger than you would believe possible. Lloyd’s house, which also has a £10,000 heat-recovery system, has a U-value of just 0.1, which means that you can practically heat it by candle power and body heat (the lower the U-value number, the greater the insulating characteristics of the material or assembly of materials).
Lloyd got into the timber-frame business almost by accident. “Two friends of mine were interested in buying a timber-frame company, and I went along for breakfast and to look,” he says. “They decided it wasn’t for them but I rang up and said, ‘I’ll have it’. Then I thought, I’ve just bought a business and I’ve got nowhere to put it. I found a site in Oswestry and was up and running in 10 days.”
This man doesn’t just have a nose for a good thing, he has the drive to make it happen, working 14-hour days, seven days a week until recently. “I work less than I did, but I’m doing other things,” he says. “I’m in the throes of buying another company, something completely different. The competition is getting greater in building now, but I just enjoy business.”
The son of a dairy farmer, Lloyd is 41, and his children are Adam, 12, and Lorna, 10. He left school at 16 to work on the farm, but the thrills of the milk round soon palled. “Farming was too slow,” he says. “So I got into the skip business, but that didn’t go so good.” He took a job working on the Oswestry bypass when he was 20 and soon found himself wheeler-dealing in timber and shipping containers.
He was surprised to find it was easy to borrow from the bank. “It was because I had bought and done up an old cottage,” he says. “So I thought there must be money in building.” When he was 23, he had paid £17,000 for a cottage up the lane from the family farm. “It was a terrible mess and I had to take it down and start again, but I knew it couldn’t be hard,” he says. That house is now worth about £300,000 and he rents it out, but he was still living in it in 1990 when he bought a plot on which to build four terraced houses. “We put in traditional cut-roofs and that took a long time,” he says. Undeterred, he bought a second plot for four houses in 1993. “It went better that time; I’d learnt by my mistakes.”
In 1994, he bought a plot for nine houses and in 1995, he built 17. Next time it was 15, then 20, all two- and three-bedroom starter homes, selling at £50,000 to £70,000. “Then I jumped to the top of the market, to the £140,000 houses,” he says. “The last 18 months have been very good for the company, CGL Developments, though it’s just steadied up now.”
Lloyds Timber Frames, on the other hand, is just getting into its stride, providing kits for housing associations, schools and two- and three-storey blocks of flats, as well as private houses. “I knew it had loads of potential and it’s becoming a very good company,” says Lloyd. “It just needed managing.”
In 2002, Lloyd determined to build the ultimate timber- frame house. He found a site with a burnt-out bungalow on it in Chirk, north Wales, and bought extra land from a neighbour.
The one-and-a-half acre plot cost £67,500. Frank Healey, an architect, designed a “bungalow” set into the sloping site to appease planners. Only one level is visible from the road, though the house effectively has three storeys, with three bedrooms and a sauna and spare kitchen in a basement area that opens to the garden and pool. The main living area is on the ground floor, with the master suite tucked within a steeply pitched roof. The result is spacious, snug and light.
“I wanted the house to be timeless and contemporary,” says Lloyd, who was keen to use bricks for the outside walls. “They are no longer made locally so I had to go further afield to get them. We had three separate loads in order to get the mix right. I also went for a traditional mortar with an 8mm rake to show off the arrises and profile of the bricks.”
The effort paid off: the brickwork won first prize for best single house in the 2003 British Brick Awards, nominated by David Armitage of the York Handmade Brick Company and sponsored by the Brick Development Association. “I didn’t think we stood a chance against all the major house builders, and didn’t go,” he says. He went the next year, though, when the same brickwork was runner-up for the most sustainable house.
Lloyd built this house for himself, and because he can. “Nobody is going to ask us for a house like this, because you’re not going to get your money back. It took two years to build, when we had the time, and the true cost of this house will never be known. It’s probably near £500,000, but it could make £1.5m on a good day because of the spot.”
Architectural details, such as a moat with covered bridge, are practical; any esoteric nod at the violent past of this part of north Wales is a secondary consideration: “At the end of the day, we’re builders and we tweaked it as we went.”
Frank Healey Associates, 01691 778 183; CGL Developments, 01691 655 555, www.cgldevelopments.co.uk; Lloyds Timber Frames, 01691 656 511, www.lloydstimberframes.co.uk; York Handmade Brick Company, 01347 838 881, www.yorkhandmade.co.uk
