Chesterfield architects designed Peak District house to be shown on telly's Grand Designs

The property will be showcased on the popular Channel 4 series on Wednesday, September 28, when its owners Mike and Sarah Hannay will be interviewed by presenter Kevin McCloud.

Built on a smallholding near Ashbourne, the house was designed by Lomas and Mitchell Architects whose practice is at Markham Vale.

Jillian Mitchell, one of the directors, who has been closely involved in the project said: "We spent about a year achieving planning approval, which we obtained under a clause called ‘Paragraph 80’ which requires design to be of ‘outstanding architectural merit’. As there are only about half a dozen Paragraph 80 approvals granted around the country in any year, the risk of rejection is very high.

"Our brief was to design a home which was flexible enough to cater for different generations living together under one roof.

"The building design is a modern interpretation of a Derbyshire Longhouse, often a long, narrow building housing humans, animals and farm machinery. At the heart of the Longhouse is the kitchen and dining area, where everyone meets to prepare food and eat together. With our project, a generous open-plan space will enable the whole family to gather.

“The building is a refined barn, with profiled cladding and a steel-framed structure. Vertical fins mirror the ‘hit-and-miss’ timber often found in barns to protect cattle and sheep from direct sunlight. The dramatic roof planes relate to angles in the surrounding countryside and the building is anchored into the landscape on both levels.

“We have been privileged to work with a great team on this project, and have delivered this building in spite of the challenges from the pandemic, the shortages in materials and the ongoing war in Ukraine.

"We had a very good design team, including Charlotte Stainton of Stainton Planning, landscape architects Ares for the approval and Hortus Collective for the delivery phase.”

Jillian chairs the steering group for The Green Register and is vice chair of the Construction and Property Forum for Destination Chesterfield. Richard Lomas, partner in the architects practice, has been a sustainability assessor for the RIBA.

She qualified as an architect at Queens University in Belfast and in 1990 moved from her native Northern Ireland to Derbyshire where she launched the practice seven years later. Jillian, who joined forces with Richard Lomas in 2017, said: “Richard had been running his practice in parallel to mine and merging the businesses made perfect sense.

"We are both passionate about low-energy design and we share the same approach to design.

"We have won awards for our work, including a barn conversion and our focus is on low-energy, private residential projects.

"Our practice is small – there are four of us at the moment – and we are fortunate to work in a low-energy building we designed for one of our engineering clients, MSE, at Markham Vale.”