Fri 7 Dec 2007
... with Jonathan Kingerlee
With eco living high on the housebuilding agenda, it is satisfying to meet a developer really practising what he preaches. Michael Dineen enters Jonathan Kingerlee's green house. 
It inspires confidence when a housing developer decides to live in one of his own products.Jonathan Kingerlee who leads the fifth generation of his Oxfordshire family construction company is setting an example by doing so.
For he wants his houses to leave the palest possible carbon footprint - and he has to be in situ to check that his theories are proving correct.
But this doesn't mean that he festoons nicely designed homes with windmills and solar panels: "Those little gadgets and bolt-ons are a waste of time," he states.
This defiant response to Gordon Brown's exhortation to have them on all houses by 2016 is not a political, but a practical one.
Kingerlee homes, as they are now being built, are he says continuing a family tradition by being well-enough constructed to prevent both heat loss and damp incursion, but these days they have a few "bolt-ons" suggested by Kingerlee's own research.
"Breathability" is the word he uses more than once as he puts the green message before me in his Kidlington office.
"By focusing on renewable energy the government is taking attention away from the main issue - the need for truly sustainable buildings which require minimal energy to run."
He believes it is not possible to generate enough on-site renewable energy to power entire schemes in urban areas - which do not necessarily lend themselves to wind and solar technology.
Also, he says, indicating not for the first time that he and his team have done their research, it takes more carbon to produce a photovoltaic panel than the panel will save over its twenty-year span on a sun-splashed roof.
All rather discouraging to people like me who would dearly love independence of the greedy power undertakings - pointing proudly to my personal windmill and telling them recklessly to get lost. Fat chance.
No, the more sensible answer lies in "envelope integrity plus breathability"-and extreme care in construction, of course.
"I have something to show you," he says and disappears from the office, to re-emerge a few moments later carrying what looks like a large, square honeycomb, pink in colour, and about the size of, say, six conventional house bricks.
It was not light, but it was certainly much lighter than a hod loaded with six bricks.
This is a Ziegel block, an import from Germany where it is used extensively in the housebuilding industry, but hardly known in Britain. Certainly very little-used here.
"Energy is running out and prices are rising all the time. It makes more and more sense to be building houses now that require less of it."
The Zeigel block is porous, breathable and also a near-perfect insulation material - and, furthermore, it is load-bearing.
But, bricklayers note, it requires a special sealant instead of mortar, and also specially formulated lime plaster so that its insulation and breathability are not compromised.
Kingerlee is not relying solely on the experience of chairman Jonathan to test drive the Ziegel. For at Lincoln Grove, in the village of Bladon, where Winston Churchill is buried, there are nine new five-bedroom Kingerlee homes built of Ziegel blocks, and to ensure there's an impartial performance test of them Oxford Brookes University is carrying out a monitoring programme in cahoots with the residents.
A family business involved for nearly 150 years in construction and development around Oxford, Kingerlee has established a reputation for sensitive handling of jobs amid the dreaming spires and ancient colleges.
More recently it has decided to expand its housebuilding, and is compiling a portfolio of developments in Oxfordshire and well beyond the county bounds, as far afield as Birmingham and Bristol.
It has plans to build 250 units in the next two years, and, in the longer term, Jonathan Kingerlee sees his company becoming a regional rather than a strictly local builder.
Kingerlee remains a family business - his brother and his father are both actively involved - but there are two non-family managing directors; and it is his aim to continue the organic growth of the company and the recruitment of senior outside professionals to help the expansion.
Nobody's talking about changing the status of the company, and the very slow turnover among the 135 payroll suggests staff are happy with their lot. A happy, conservative family business, in fact, and something of a rarity.
The move into environmentally friendly housebuilding is anything but conservative, though Jonathan, with understandable pride, likes to think his Ziegel block home will still be around in two hundred years.
Of course, with devices such as heat exchangers and the like needed in Kingerlee's heat conserving and fuel saving homes, there's bound to be an on-cost. Jonathan puts it as perhaps as much as 30 per cent, but he refuses to be drawn into how long it would take the new owner to amortise this by way of reduced fuel bills.
Cynics have said it could take a couple of centuries, but Jonathan believes time is on his side: "Energy is running out and prices are rising all the time. It makes more and more sense to be building houses now that require less of it."
He is not alone. A few like-minded developers have formed the Sustainable Development Foundation, based in London and associated with the Good Homes Alliance. Essentially it is a watchdog and lobbying organisation, designed to spread the good word and to badger government.
Soon, too, the Good Homes Alliance will have the necessary authority to issue its own charter marks of approval to developers building eco-friendly homes, to the good guys who go about their business leaving no carbon footprints.
As winter was approaching I asked Jonathan about Yuletide fires in his blameless home. The old Yule Log spitting merrily in the grate?
"Yes my house has a wood burner which I fuel with fallen branches. But there's no open fireplace - that would destroy all the good insulation work we've been doing!"
First published in Show House Magazine December 2007.
The greatest care has been taken to ensure accuracy but some information contained within this article may have changed since it was first published.
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