Project
Newton Park
Sometimes you need 53 acres and an eight-car underground garage to call somewhere home.
Newton Park is a contemporary replacement dwelling on a 53-acre estate in South Derbyshire. The house it takes over from had the whole estate to work with and was sited as though somebody had closed their eyes and let go. The new one puts 22,000 sq ft across four floors, buries the pool, the gym and eight cars, and makes its own power from the roof and the field.
type
Private Residential
Client
Private Client
status
Under Construction
location
South Derbyshire
Year
2020
Area
22,000 sq ft
Services
Architectural Design
Planning
3D Visualisation
The House That Was Already There
Fifty-three acres of Derbyshire countryside, and a house sitting on it like a caravan parked in a cathedral. Generic, badly placed, pointed at nothing much. Our clients could see exactly what the site could be, and exactly how little the building was doing about it. Their brief ran to a contemporary family home, basement leisure space and a detached summerhouse for entertaining. It also ran to living off the grid, which is the point where the ambition stopped being about square footage.
The Site Got a Vote
The question was never how big we could go. It was where the building should sit, which way it should face, and which parts of the 53 acres to leave alone. The answer put most of the volume underground and kept what's above ground low, long and quiet. Twenty-two thousand square feet, and you'd struggle to point it out to the neighbours. There are no neighbours, but the point stands.
The Basement That Isn't One
Below ground: the saltwater pool, the yoga studio, the gym, the plant room and an eight-car garage, reached through 20-metre-wide steel-clad concertina doors. Airport hangars have smaller ones. Ceiling heights run past 3.5 metres throughout, so "basement" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. There's a lift to all four floors, which stops being a flourish and starts being logistics the moment your gym is two storeys below your kitchen.
The Bit You Can See
Putting the pool and the cars underground is what lets the house above stay low. From the approach you read two storeys and a long horizontal roof, not the 22,000 sq ft that's there. The site keeps its skyline. The clients keep their pool.
Stone From Down the Road, Glass From Switzerland
The windows and doors are Skyframe, carrying some of the thinnest frames available anywhere, which works out as a lot of glass held up by almost nothing. The stone is Derbyshire stone, quarried locally, so the walls came from roughly the same geology as the hole they're standing in. And the Corten cladding is meant to rust. The weathered layer is the finish, not the failure, which takes some explaining on site.
Glass You Forget Is There
Triple glazing isn't only about heat loss. At this much glass it's also what keeps a Derbyshire wind on the correct side of it. Composite timber runs alongside the stone and the steel, because 22,000 sq ft of one hard surface is a multi-storey car park, not a house.
Off-Grid Ambitions
Our clients didn't want a beautiful house that quietly cost a fortune to run. They wanted one that could look after itself. A 40kW+ solar array feeds a plant room holding more than 20 batteries, a figure that reads like a typo until you work out what it takes to run 53 acres on weather. Ground source heat pumps and air heat recovery do the warmth: no flue, no tank, no delivery. A standalone wind turbine picks up what the sun doesn't. The target is an estate that makes more than it takes.
The Roof, the Rain and the Walled Garden
An intensive sedum roof with rainwater attenuation means whatever lands on the building stays the building's problem. There's a walled garden too, and an enclosed herb garden off the summerhouse, both of which have been running off-grid since long before anyone specified a battery.
Not One Building. Several.
Tucked into the private woodland sits a garage and workshop holding the machinery it takes to keep 53 acres in order. Fifty-three acres don't maintain themselves. The detached summerhouse has a chef's kitchen, an integrated pizza oven and its own enclosed herb garden, on the reasonable grounds that walking back to the main house for oregano is a design fault.
A house, a summerhouse, a workshop and a garage. Only one of them has a pizza oven, which feels like a missed opportunity.
Thinking about replacing the house on your land?
The first useful conversation covers three things: what you own, what you want in its place, and what the council will make of it. Tell us the site and the order of budget you are working to, and we will tell you which of those three is the hard one.
Newton Park FAQ
Questions about Newton Park
Newton Park is a private 53-acre estate in South Derbyshire. It was designed by JSA Architects, a Midlands practice with studios in Derby, Nottingham, Lichfield and Solihull.
It is a replacement dwelling. An existing house on the estate is being replaced with a 22,000 sq ft contemporary home over four floors, including a full basement level.
A saltwater pool, a yoga studio, a gym, the plant room and an eight-car garage, reached through 20-metre-wide steel-clad concertina doors. Ceiling heights run over 3.5 metres and a four-floor lift connects the level to the rest of the house.
That is the ambition the estate was designed around. Newton Park generates its own electricity and heat on site and stores it, with the target of making more energy across a year than it draws.
A 40kW+ solar array, ground source heat pumps, air heat recovery and a standalone wind turbine, with more than 20 batteries storing what is generated. An intensive sedum roof and rainwater attenuation handle water on site, and a walled garden and herb garden handle some of the food.
Locally quarried Derbyshire stone, weathering Corten steel and composite timber, with Skyframe triple glazing carrying some of the thinnest window frames available.
No. Newton Park sits at the top end of our residential work. Most of it is extensions, remodels and one-off houses across Derby, Nottingham, Lichfield and Solihull, run by the same team and the same process.
Architectural design, the planning application and 3D visualisation, from the first concept sketches through to the visuals the client used to test the scheme. The house is currently under construction.
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