Wow. The scale of this Irish development is immense: 219 Passive House homes planned across a 26-acre site in Belfast, a £70m project . The first 12 houses released for sale sold in less than a hour. A further nine are about to be offered, completing the first release. These homes are expected to be completed mid-2022.
Classic UK style, with a mixture of detached and semi-detached two-bedroom house designs.
We’ve one builder/developer starting on this journey in New Zealand already. Once Ethos Homes has that experience under its belt and the New Zealand Building Code is improved, I expect we’ll arrive at this sort of scale (and demand) locally.
Lancaster Park developer David Millar told a local newspaper, “We have been absolutely blown away by the demand for these homes, which has given us a further vote of confidence that this truly is the future of home buying in Northern Ireland. Today’s house buyer wants a home that is built to a top standard but also makes sense for their pocket. These homes not only look brilliant, but they function like no other home available on the market, and they are value for money.
“We have adopted the absolute best-practice and gold standard in home building – Passivhaus. Which means that each home is built with meticulous attention to detail and rigorous design and construction according to principles developed by the Passivhaus Institute in Germany.
“Every single home will be certified through an exacting quality assurance process to exceptional standards of airtightness, is triple-glazed and super-insulated, with heat-exchange systems, so that it requires almost no heating and has cleaner filtered air throughout.
“With superb insulation it means that home running costs will be reduced significantly, and we have entirely eradicated the reliance on fossil fuels–so they are much better for the environment.”
Also typical is the compact, simple floor-plan. This four-bedroom, two-bathroom home is less than 127m2.