"The body of the house is entirely made of materials that have been grown."

Paloma Gormley of Practice Architecture

Flat House is a three bedroom single family house designed and built by Practice Architecture and Material Cultures at Margent Farm in Cambridgeshire. It aims to be a prototype of prefabricated hemp-based construction with radically low embodied carbon to be replicated for larger scale housing constructions. Working collaboratively with engineers and material specialists, the prefabricated panels used consisted of hemp shiv harvested directly from the surrounding fields. This enables rapid construction and drastically minimise the embodied carbon from material transport.

Hero Materials

Hemp Shiv / Hempcrete: Locally sourced from the farm's surrounding fields, it forms the infill for the prefabricated timber panels. Hempcrete is a sustainable, low-carbon material that provides excellent thermal performance.

Prefabricated Timber: Used for the structural frame (planed timber and engineered I-joists), offering a renewable, low-embodied-energy, and efficient construction method.

Sustainability Highlights

Locally Sourced Material: The use of hemp shiv sourced directly from the surrounding Margent Farm fields is a pure example of a hyper-local, "field-to-wall" construction supply chain, drastically minimizing the embodied carbon from material transport.

Low-Impact Construction: The use of hempcrete (a mixture of hemp shiv, lime binder, and water) provides excellent thermal insulation and acts as a carbon sink (sequestering $\text{CO}_2$ as it cures).

Prefabrication: Construction used prefabricated panels of planed timber and engineered I-joists, which typically leads to less material waste and faster, more efficient build times on-site.

Project Team

Architects: Material Cultures, Practice Architecture

Clients: Margent Farm

Engineering: Jon Shanks

Collaborators: Material Cultures, Margent Farm, Oscar Cooper, Henry Stringer

Suppliers/Manufacturers: Margent Farm, HG Matthews’s Brickworks