Dig Deep to Enjoy Living in the London Underground.
Mail on Sunday, May 23, 2004
Underground homes have traditionally appealed to the profoundly paranoid and eco-freaks striving to save the planet, but in London, subterranean living is one way to satisfy nitpicking planners.
In ritzy areas such as Kensington, Chelsea and Noting Hill, digging out the back garden is an established way of dramatically increasing the size of a home without outraging the neighbours.
In suburbs such as Bushey Heath, Herts, digouts costing £100,000 or more, let alone a complete underground house, are a rarity.
When environmentally aware Jonathan Keren Black and his wife Susan sought to build a larger house in the back garden of their Twenties semi in Bushey Heath, their intentions were conventional. ‘If the planners had allowed it, we would have had the house above ground,’ says Jonathan, a rabbi. ‘But they would only give permission for a house that was the same size as the current one.’ While reading a self-build magazine, Jonathan came across pictures of an underground house in Gloucestershire which was his introduction to earth-sheltering’, the term used by enthusiasts of underground living.
With the help of an architect and a sympathetic gas supplier, they dug up the entire garden and built Undermill, a three-bedroom, three-bathroom house featuring lavatories that flush using rainwater, pumps that remove ground water and the Blacks’ personal petrol station. As owners of an experimental car powered by natural gas, they filled up from a hose near the front door.
The house has two ‘Jack and Jill’ bedrooms with a shared bathroom. In 1995, two years after the first shovelful of earth was shifted at Undermill, the Blacks’ daughter Naomi was born, followed by Adam four years later. The restored garden on the roof became their playground.
Welsh tepee dwellers embrace quasi-primitive lifestyles, but earth shelters do not necessarily mean a hair-shirt existence. Undermill’s rooms are large and bright, and creature comforts include a patio/barbecue area accessible from three rooms.
The house is very quiet and highly secure, easy to maintain and cheap to run, and the living areas are lighter and brighter than a conventional house,’ says Jonathan.
The Blacks had already sold the original house as a separate freehold, and a few years ago moved to Melbourne, Australia. Undermill was rented out for a year.
We are selling now to fund a new house we want to build in Australia,’ says Jonathan. Undermill is up for auction on Wednesday with a guide price of £180,000.
There are about 30 earth shelter homes in the UK, according to David Woods of the British Earth Shelter Association. As they are below ground and tend to hide behind walls or fences, the underground homes in and around London are mostly anonymous.
Invisible to outsiders, the oddly, and revealingly, named Minus One Kew Gardens Road has just come on to the market at £725,000.
Opposite an entrance to the Royal Botanic Gardens, the recently built property is an ultra-modern architect-designed showpiece that would have interfered with the light of at least one adjoining property had it been built above ground.
In contrast to Undermill, which has an earth roof, Minus One has no roof at all. The rooms—arranged into two bedrooms and a spacious open-plan kitchen/dining room/lounge—sit around a circular sunken open-air patio atrium. The main rooms are all enclosed behind glass overlooking the patio, so light floods into every room.
Also hidden behind a wall, a plot of land in Oxford Gardens, Notting Hill, had seemed destined to remain undeveloped forever. Planners would only allow building on
the land if the new structure was not above the height of the wall.
As the market for 6-foot-high houses is non-existent this side of Mars, there were no takers—until architect Alex Michaelis decided to dig deep.
Michaelis is building a five-bedroom townhouse, with a play area for his children and, on the lower level, an indoor swimming pool with sliding doors. He plans to draw water from his own bore hole and use solar panels for energy.
If the sun is kind, he could sell surplus energy back to the grid. Despite the £750,000 cost of the land, and perhaps the same amount to build the house, he could make a handsome profit when he sells.