Creating A Uniquely Sustainable Bed & Breakfast
Our aim at Bank View Farm was to create a uniquely sustainable Bed & Breakfast as well as leading a more sustainable family life. As an architect specialising in environmental design; and living on a small holding with a superb horticulturalist for a wife, we had the skills to achieve this. It has been a wonderful journey over the last 10 years to create the home, the bed and breakfast and the surrounding small-holding which we now enjoy every day. Why not come and share the joys of Bank View Farm.
Bank View Farm, The Building
We built the farm and converted the barn in 2011. I was an architect, at the time designing and leading large prestigious redevelopments in London. I wanted to use these skills to create something truly special.
In building the farm we have:-
- Used cutting edge technologies to minimise the requirement for external services.
- Used the best building practices to make a super insulated, super sealed building which maintains a wonderful steady temperature.
- Minimised the impact of the building process by reusing local materials and the old stone from the farm and using local labour and doing as much work ourselves as possible.
Running a Sustainable Bed & Breakfast
Following on from this we wanted to create a truly sustainable lifestyle for ourselves and a sustainable bed and breakfast business for guests.
Our environmental life running the B&B at the farm aims to:-
- Grow and cook as much of our own food as possible. See more about our breakfasts.
- Source the best local produce for what we cannot grow ourselves.
- Provide luxury for guests without the common wasteful packaging in items provided.
- In managing the farm and Bed & Breakfast we recycle and maintain as much as possible ourselves.
We are a family run business. We have created the bed and breakfast suites ourselves, and as a family we maintain and look after the rooms, buildings and the wider small holding.
Managing a productive smallholding
We started to establish productive areas on the small holding from the outset. We planted an orchard and planted native hedgerows to protect large soft fruit and vegetable areas from the wind. We fenced off fields for poultry and created an apiary for our bee hives.
Now we have an established and productive orchard, and wonderful well laid out vegetable and soft fruit gardens and a large polytunnel. This means that we can grow a large proportion of the fruit and vegetables required for the family and bed & breakfast. We grow enough apples to keep us in apple juice and cider throughout the year. We grow enough fruit to make jam for ourselves and the bed and breakfast year round.
- Our hens keep us in eggs year around.
- We grow flowers to provide cut flowers through the bed and breakfast for most of the year.
- We bake our own cakes and breads on the farm.
There is nothing more rewarding than seeing a whole food cycle in action. We planted our orchard, it is pollinated by our bees, we harvest the fruit and make our own jam and are able to serve a variety of jams and honey to our guests. Our hens and geese are free range in the orchard grazing on the grass, eating windfalls and laying eggs for us to serve to our guests.
Cutting Edge Technologies
When creating the farm we were keen to invest in the latest technology to minimise our carbon footprint.
The farm has over 1km of pipes beneath our fields which power the commercial scale ground source heat pump. We have a dedicated plant room full of hot water tanks to maximise the efficiency of the system and ensure that the whole house is maintained at a very comfortable steady temperature with plentiful hot water available at all times. This is supplemented during the summer with the use of solar thermal panels on our large south facing roof.
The rest of this roof is filled with photo-voltaic panels to create electricity to help power the heat pump.
To minimise heat loss we have a full house system of mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. Ducts were built in throughout the house to supply fresh pre-warmed air into all habitable rooms with air being extracted from all kitchens and bathrooms.
We even have a commercial scale rain water harvesting tank which collects all of the water from our roofs into an underground tank. This is pumped around the farm to help irrigate our crops.
The Farm Building
In building the farm we reused stone from the old derelict buildings using traditional techniques. We then used exemplar detailing with insulated cavity walls and a full secondary layer of insulation inside the walls. The buildings are then fully sealed between the two layers of insulation with ultra-high performing argon filled glazing units.
We used local labour and builders and did as much of the clearing, landscaping and fitting out works as we could ourselves, teaching ourselves many new skills in the process.
Encouraging Ecology
Since owning the farm we have been trying to encourage biodiversity. We love the local wildlife and the superb setting of the farm. We always look to add to and enrich the environment and support the local wildlife.
- We have planted around 1km of native hedgerows.
- We have planted a two acre wildlife woodland.
- We have created a large wildlife pond in the woodland.
- We have created other smaller ponds around the farm.
We have set up over 12 bird feeders to suit a wide variety of wild birds which we keep full throughout the year to support the local bird life.
We have created specialist habitats for insects, birds, small mammals and hedgehogs throughout the farm, and have put up a variety of bird boxes around our land.
We are still planning on extending our wildlife wood and encouraging wild flower meadows and more diverse habitats.
Living on the edge of the Blackamoor Wildlife reserve we get a huge range of birds and wildlife to the farm which give us joy every day.
Why Not Visit?
The creation of Bank View Farm Bed & Breakfast has been a wonderful journey in which we have learnt many new skills and fallen in love with the idyllic valley we live in. If you do come to stay at Bank View Farm then we are always happy to show you around the farm and what we are doing to make our farm more sustainable.
