Grand Designs Magazine is an official monthly publication based on the popular television show Grand Designs, hosted by Kevin McCloud on Channel 4 and More 4. Grand Designs program is a concept to showcase ambitious property developments and transformations. The houses shown tend to be unique and impressive, such as the Offland Villa. .They explore people who are building their own dream homes or extensions. The episode with the Offland Villa is one of their most viewed and famous episodes (23rd series). It showed the journey of dreaming and creating this incredible residence, featuring Colin and Adele from Hale in Greater Manchester, and their extraordinary house Offland Villa which was designed by Vasco Trigueiros architecture company.
Offland Villa
The project that McCloud focused on is the Offland Villa, so let’s briefly look at this masterpiece building before anything else. The homeowners had the ambition to construct a new property on the site of the 1980s-built house that they’d bought in 2012. Colin and Adele Offland, the owners of Offland Villa, had a clear idea about what they needed from their magnificent new house. Colins explained that they had a simple Scandinavian-inspired design in their mind that had lots of wood inside and outside it, using ECO-friendly materials and a structure which blended seamlessly with nature. Based on their experience of curves and cantilevers of American Art Deco beach hotels that they have seen back in Miami, they wanted the design to reflect this element too.
Design
One of Colin’s friends recommended a Swedish architect, Vasco Trigueiros, for the design process. Vasco Trigueiros Architecture is a famous architectural design studio in Sweden, created in 2003. They provide fantastic attention to detail and a great passion for stretching creativity in their designs to develop highly innovative architecture that combines contemporary touches with authentic Scandinavian heritage. Vasco Trigueiros completely understood their motivations and views on sustainability, and after one month, they delivered a prototype design that was almost what they required. With very few changes to the prototype, Vasco designed a three-story house with rounded corners for them. He created a beautiful monster in which the two upper levels were clad in timber and cantilevered over a ground floor incorporating big expanses of curved glass. The planning process of Offland Villa started in 2013, and it took almost two years to complete. There were some doubts about the entire project, but finally, in August 2018, the family moved to a rented home.
Construction
Vasco Trigueiros joined with UK architect Keven Lester and several different construction teams to carry out other parts of the building with a Latvian-based construction firm as the main contractor. The owners decided on all of these, and set a £750,000 budget limitation. On the episode we discover that despite the efforts of the Offland Villa owners to keep the cost down, the raised expenses were because of the changes they made to the suggested timber frame to a steel one. Because of some disputes with the Latvian company and the pandemic, the site stopped working in February 2020 by, the end of the pandemic, and hired a new workforce; builders returned to the site to complete the timber cladding alongside Colin’s sister, Dawn Golding, who has a family glass-making business was the final step to complete the project.
An architect from a Swedish-Italian company with an excellent specialty in bespoke furniture and fittings did the interior design. Moreover, the home’s electrical source is supplied by solar photovoltaic (PV) panels that are installed on the roof with two emergency solar storage batteries. To have a touch of sophistication and perfection, they decided to add smart home equipment, for which they got help from our company, Hestia Smart Living, to collaborate in this extraordinary villa.
A Symphony of Smart Living
Hestia Smart Living experts and designers in collaboration with Trigueiros Architecture, commissioned a complete home automation system with a focus on seamless integration and user experience, which includes:
- Lighting Control
- Blind Control
- Pool Control
- Home Cinema
- Climate Control
- Av Distribution
- Irrigation System
- Automated Heat Recovery system
It’s good to mention that the heat recovery system combined with the state of the art Tesla renewable system to have the best experience.
The result
The episode on Grand Design displays the outstanding building in the British neighborhood of Hale, located in Manchester and the journey it took to create such a masterpiece. With a green living wall of plants and tall trees shielding Villa Offland. The design of the home was inspired by traditions of Northern architecture, with a thin vertical cedar wood cladding that is dazzlingly curved around its structure. Architecture and landscape design merge seamlessly in the Villa Offland, and were completed carefully considering the neighboring buildings for privacy. The project’s defining feature is a sculptural steel frame that is beautifully adorned with wood and glass to show its inherent strength. The combination of Trigueiros architectural masterpiece and the Hestia smart home system displays the modern aesthetic face of this house.