Virginia Water

A house heated from beneath its meadow…

A single-storey, four-bedroom home on the edge of Windsor Great Park, designed by McLean Quinlan for clients leaving London who wanted somewhere efficient, calm and open to the landscape. The house wraps around a central courtyard that pulls southern light into a north-facing site and screens out the noise of a busy road. It sits raised above the floodplain, low among the trees, so that it almost disappears into the site.

We Design For were the M&E engineers. We also carried out the energy and overheating modelling.

Fabric first, then systems…

The architecture does the heavy lifting: a timber frame with minimal steel, triple glazing, very high airtightness, automated shading and new tree planting to keep summer heat out. Our job was to design services that match that ambition without cluttering a quiet house.

• Heating: a 13kW ground source heat pump drawing on 150m  of horizontal slinky ground loops buried beneath the wildflower meadow, so nothing shows above ground. Low temperature underfloor heating throughout.
• Ventilation: mechanical ventilation with heat recovery keeps fresh air moving through an airtight house while holding on to its heat.
• Hot water: 400 litres of hot water storage.
• Overheating: we successfully modelled the design against summer overheating with the shading and ventilation strategy in place.

The numbers…

• 1.30 m³/(h·m²) at 50 Pa, measured. The final air test in February 2024 came in at under a sixth of the current Building Regulations maximum of 8.
• Over 60% less CO₂ than the Building Regulations target, as designed.
• Fabric energy efficiency over 20% better than the target, as designed.
• SAP rating 87 (B), as designed.

As featured in: ArchitectureLab (30 September 2026) · EST Living (16 September 2026) · Divisare (22 September 2026)

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