Welcome to Beechwood Village, a new community of over 250 custom-built homes and part of a wider masterplan regenerating the Craylands Estate in Basildon, designed by Pollard Thomas Edwards Architects.

These factory-built homes made with Sylva™ by Stora Enso perfectly demonstrate the possibilities of customisation from a standardized kit of parts.

Each house was designed in such a way that owners could further customise the design of their own home, creating a very high level of variety. Potential buyers could design their new home via an online configurator - they select their plot, choose preferred house type, number of bedrooms, amend plan arrangement and pick external finishes. Residents could even add bays or extensions. The developers, Basildon Council, accomplished this within a relatively constrained budget. 

''This is custom build innovation in action. On one side the architecht has developed a formula for customising at scale, offering a million choices on a large site, supported by a digitized process. But the concept of customised home is being used at Beechwood West as a marketing tool to create interest and demand, attracting residents that might not otherwise consider the development. Clever stuff indeed." said Duncan Hayes, Editor, Custom Build Strategy in the RIBA Journal.

The result is a RIBA low carbon award-winning scheme. The efficiencies of off-site construction, together with the use of cross-laminated timber (CLT) by Stora Enso, allowed the scheme to achieve very low levels of embodied carbon.

Together with a fabric-first design approach, Beechwood Village delivers high-performance facades with exceptional airtightness and insulation. 

When the jury for the RIBA awards visited the site they were particularly struck by the sense of community and nature. Oftentimes, modular estates prioritise car access, and parking but here we see communal spaces and landscaping with wildlife corridors between neighbouring parks which adds to the sense of home and placemaking.

Learn more:

Beechwood development

Planning application

Scheme

Advantages of building with mass timber

Off-site manufactured homes 

Sustainability

The design for manufacture process (DfMA) offers enormous potential for enhanced levels of sustainability. Demand for increased fabric performance to meet net zero carbon targets require the construction industry to deliver improved airtightness and minimal thermal bridges as standard.

Building with a Sylva kit of parts can deliver more certainty regarding quality and precision prior to installation on site. Off-site manufacture and modular construction techniques promote the creation of assemblies of components that can be easily installed, maintained or replaced as required.

A process of assembly and disassembly using mechanical fixings also offers significant reductions to lifecycle costs going forward. The impact of transportation and carbon emissions associated with multiple inefficient deliveries to site can also be reduced.

Most critically, by its nature CLT offers enormous carbon benefits over other materials such as concrete or steel as timber sequesters carbon, effectively capturing and storing away atmospheric carbon dioxide. Stora Enso's CLT continues to have one of the best Environmental Product Declarations for their CLT on the market today.

Awards

-RIBA East Award 2024 - Winner

-RIBA National Award 2024 - Winner

-National Housing Award 2017 - Highly Commended

-Planning Awards - Award for planning for increased housing delivery 2018 - Winner

-Essex Housing Awards - Large Housing Scheme (101+ homes) - Winner

-Unlock Net Zero Awards - Development of the year - homes 2024 - Highly Commended