Architect Michael Dillon has had an eventful year.

This month, the Sand’s End Arts & Community Centre in London, which Dillon codesigned as an associate at Mae Architects, was announced as a finalist for the Royal Institute of British Architects’ annual Stirling Prize, awarded to the UK’s best building. With its lightweight cross-laminated-timber structure and exterior bricks recycled from construction waste, Sand’s End provided an epiphany.

“It sparked a fire in me,” Michael explains, “that there was a way to create architecture that was still really beautiful, but equally sustainable at the same time.”

For much of this year, however, Michael was busy with a much smaller project. One which he not only designed himself, but also hand-built—and it kicked off the formation of his own firm, AOMD.

£556

Floor

£880

Walls

£632

Roof

£1,197

External Cladding

£706

Doors & Windows

£97

Paint

£120

Built-In Desk

£40

Electrical

£320

Foundation & Landscaping

Grand Total: £4,548

Dubbed the Garden Studio, it sits on a gently sloping hillside at the edge of a protected wilderness in Tunbridge Wells, behind the renovated former council house that Michael shares with his wife, acclaimed artist Eleanor May Watson (who paints in the reclaimed motorcycle garage next door). But this isn’t just an architect’s studio. It’s also a kind of continuing experiment into how buildings can be made without so much waste and carbon.

Michael’s studio priced out at £4,548 (approximately $5,045)—a fraction of what traditional approaches would have cost. “A garden studio costs a lot. To buy something like this off the shelf, you're talking like £30,000 to £40,000 perhaps in the UK. And they're really clunky,” he says. “I didn’t have that money, but I knew the material costs—and I knew that I could do it for less if I built it myself.”

The Garden Studio is designed without any unnecessary concrete, toxins, plastics, or glues—instead, Michael favoried recycled and natural materials. Whenever possible, he removed membranes and linings to enable the building to be fully breathable. It’s also designed to be as low-carbon as possible, and to utilize local materials.

Michael calculates the Garden Studio’s embodied carbon dioxide level at 455 kilograms of CO2 per square meter—far below the LETI (London Energy Transformation Initiative) Climate Emergency Design Guide’s 2020 target of 540. Its largest emissions contribution is its off-the-shelf window systems (their glass is finished in the UK, but the frames are made in Latvia).

He kept the studio’s size to 14 square meters (just over 150 square feet); anything larger would have required a permit. With its pitched roof and simple Douglas fir cladding, the studio blends in with the surrounding vernacular buildings.

The large picture window, however, “was definitely a moment of trying to make it overtly contemporary,” he says. Because of the window, the little studio attracts onlookers. “You can see it from the top of the valley,” the architect says. “There’s a number of benches that people always sit on; you can always see them looking in from there. I just wanted to make something that sort of was simple and sat in its place, and maybe some people think, ‘I’d like that.’”

Michael built the Garden Studio himself, though he cautions that he is no master carpenter.

“My grandfather was a boatbuilder, and as a kid I was always in and around this stuff, but I’ve never really flexed my capabilities,” he explains. “As an architect, you’re often out of touch with certain disciplines and different trades. I was curious how to do each of the steps. To be honest, now that I’ve done it, I don’t really want to do it again—but I have the confidence that I can actually build something.”

Construction began in April and, with the architect juggling a full-time job and swings of the hammer, took about four months. Starting in spring added another layer of difficulty: torrential rains, be it when digging the foundation, or when the time came to erect the walls.

“We started putting it up, and then the heavens opened,” he remembers. “But it had to go up that day, because not everything was waterproof. The hemp insulation was sitting there like a sponge. I think we started at 9 a.m., and we finished at 10 in the dark.”

The architect believes that timber-frame buildings need to breathe, which is why he avoiding impervious insulation layers. The studio is protected by a 25-millimeter wood fiber sheathing board, without an additional membrane layer, which “offers another layer of protection that is pretty impervious to water, but it’s breathable,” he says.

The timber frame is filled with hemp insulation, which gives way to an interior of ESB (Elka Strong Board), an alternative to traditional oriented strand board, which Michael says is “full of glue and solvents. ESB is just 100 percent recycled wood, and it breathes.”

As the cost of wood and other materials climbed during construction, Michael actually found heretofore higher-cost materials like ESB and hemp insulation became cost competitive, or even cheaper than the original, less-sustainable materials.

Even though architects and builders are, as professionals, generally more knowledgeable about materials and construction methods than the general public, and even though most of us won’t build anything by ourselves like Dillon did, he stresses that any client can build with environmentally friendly materials and approaches to achieve a similar low-carbon outcome.

“All the builders have a certain supply chain, and literally if you just go one click beyond those, you get a whole world of different materials,” he says. “What the layperson can do is to test that architect or builder on how things will be constructed.”

Michael’s wife, Eleanor, paints interior architectural scenes—views of stately homes that dissolve into mysterious near-abstractions, each picture almost like a celluloid frame caught in the projector and melting. But the view out the Garden Studio’s large window is more like a classic English pastoral scene by Thomas Gainsborough or John Constable.

“The view to the Valley is amazing,” Michael says. “My day is marked by seeing deer, and yesterday I had a little bird get caught in the studio, which was a bit traumatic. But it’s things like that: I notice the seasons, and every single day I see the beauty of everything.”

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Architectural Office Michael Dillon (AOMD) / @__aomd

Builder: Michael Dillon

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Budget Breakdown: An Architect Builds an Experimental Garden Studio for Less Than £5K