The
hi-tech green home
Derbyshire engineer planning to put a
high-tech spin on ecofriendly living
Some people like a challenge. For
Robin Hamilton, a successful engineer and entrepreneur, it is not enough
to win rare planning permission to build a one-off country house in
Derbyshire. Oh, no. His house is going to be a 10,000-sq-ft circular
construction - generating all its own power and with its own water
supply - that rotates on rollers to track the sun and wind.
It could even be your house: Hamilton
has already begun work on the Dumble, named after the hollow in which it
will sit, but is putting the 10-acre site, with its approved design, up
for sale. For a guide price of £4.5m, he will complete the house to the
buyer’s specification.
It’s an intriguing proposition. This
is an idyllic place, with views across a river valley to distant hills.
As the sun tracks across the sky, the house will follow it automatically,
turning through 180 degrees over 12 hours. The speed will be almost
imperceptible - about 2in a minute, though it will be possible to make
it move 50 times faster if you want, bringing it up to the speed of that
1960s favourite, the revolving restaurant. If there is no sun, it will
track the direction of the wind.
So, what’s the point, apart from sheer
fun? Hamilton estimates that the house will capture up to twice as much
energy as a conventional one because - like an old-fashioned windmill -
it will always point in the right direction. “The process can be
reversed to cool it,” he says. “The living space can revolve away from
the sun on hot days.” Nor is much power needed to make it spin: a highly
geared 1kW electric motor will do the job.
Hamilton, 61, and his wife, Rosy, 60,
were planning to sell their existing country estate - a large red-brick
farmhouse with several outbuildings on 19 acres of rolling Derbyshire
landscape near Ashbourne - to finance the building of the rotating
wonder on their own land nearby. Now, though, they are testing the
market.
Both the old building and the new
project next door are up for sale. The asking price for the six-bedroom
farmhouse is £1.4m. The Dumble, however, is aimed at a rather different
market - hence its much higher price tag. If the farmhouse fetches
enough, the Hamiltons will keep the revolving project for themselves;
otherwise they are happy to complete it for the buyer. It will cost
pretty much nothing to run - and, in that scenario, you’d have its
inventor as a neighbour.
Intrigued by the sheer eccentricity of
all this, I took the train to Derbyshire to meet the couple. Hamilton,
whose CV includes a long spell working on advanced jet engines for Rolls-Royce,
and whose company produced the Aston Martin Nimrod series of Le Mans
racing cars in the early 1980s, was never going to design himself a
conventional house. His contacts throughout the engineering industry
have yielded a rich supply of components for the Dumble. For instance?
As we walk through the huge barn that is his workshop, he shows me the
beautiful shiny metal bearing around which the entire 650-ton building
will revolve.
“Where did you get that?” I ask.
“That’s classified information,” he says after a pause. “But it’s the
kind of thing you’d expect to find in the gun turret of a battleship.”
Hamilton also has a huge stash of giant plastic pipes, which will be set
vertically and filled with concrete to act both as the walls of the
house and as a heat store, capturing the warmth of the sun. He has
already shifted 5,000 tons of rocky soil and put in the inner ring of
foundations, as well as sinking the borehole that will provide water and
a ground source for the ultra-low-energy heat pumps. Here, near
Ashbourne, the water is so pure, you could in theory bottle it and sell
it.
If the house revolves, then how do you
connect the plumbing and wiring? Hamilton draws me a diagram. It’s easy:
it will swing no more than 180 degrees to and fro, so all you need are
long, flexible reinforced hoses in the undercroft. “You know the mobile
rubber hoses in a car wash? It’s the same principle,” he says. He has
also designed a low-velocity wind turbine and a new type of concrete for
the walls, made from the local limestone.
Planning permission for the Dumble was
granted under the ultra-strict PPS7 legislation, which allows new
country houses on virgin rural land only if they are demonstrably
excellent. It will have miles of views across the valley of the River
Dove to the Weaver Hills beyond. This is without doubt one of the best
sites for a property I’ve seen for a while.
However pioneering it all seems,
revolving houses are not a new idea. The Victorians were keen on
rotating summerhouses and beach huts, and some small rotating bungalows
built in Belgium in the 1950s are still working.
The Dumble will be on a much grander
scale, though - about four times the size of an average four-bed-room
house. It will be three storeys high and 82ft wide, with bedrooms on the
ground floor, living and dining areas on the middle floor and what is
drawn as a big empty space - which a buyer could use as they wish - on
top.
Hamilton estimates that, thanks to his
magpie-like scavenging for components, it can be built for less than
half the price of a conventional house of the same size, although the
cost of steel and other raw materials is rising.
All the floors will be suspended from
the roof, which means no fat columns to get in the way. You can divide
up the space however you like. A more conventional lower block is
planned alongside for garaging and stabling, and is spacious enough to
provide a temporary home for the Hamiltons while they finish the big
revolver.
There’s another story here. The
couple’s three daughters have all grown up and settled elsewhere, so
they’re asking themselves whether they really need all that space. One
thing is certain: Hamilton has the bit between his teeth and is
determined to see the Dumble built, for himself or someone else. I think
he might just do it.
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