Box House

Box House, Studio Bark’s flagship U-Build project, materialised our innovative self-build system into a two-storey home on the first street at Graven Hill in Bicester – a pioneering development of 1,900 Custom and Self-Build homes (CSH) that aimed to double to country’s CSH market by 2020. Nine other pilot houses were built alongside Box House, forming the first phase of the growing community of self-build homes in Oxfordshire. 

The Build

The brief was challenging: deliver a DIY, robust, affordable first home for a young couple with limited budget and construction experience, that also offered the flexibility to convert from two to three bedrooms in the future.

The clients, Chris and Roxie, largely built the timber house themselves, with the help of a team of aspiring architects as part of Studio Bark’s No Building As Usual live-build educational programme. 

The result is a large, open and light-filled timber house built using our modular box system, with a carefully detailed black timber cladding exterior. 

“A talented and dedicated team of young, ambitious architects who had the rare ability to understand exactly what we wanted from a home […] It was a pleasure to work with them and I would recommend them to anyone wanting something distinctive and beautiful whilst allowing an appreciation for all of your modern life demands.” Client, Box House

Accessible Self-Build System

The U-Build system begins as CNC-cut wooden panels, which are manufactured off-site, delivered flat-packed and then assembled and bolted together to form a structure. 

It was through Box House’s success that U-Build proved to offer an affordable, simple construction solution that made self-building an entire home accessible and fast, with the structural and fabrication support from Structure Workshop and Cut and Construct. The home’s shell took only a month to construct and an additional eight weeks for the modular internal fit-out, completed by our Studio Bark Projects team. The green roof, solar panels and electrics were installed by contractors to achieve project completion within four months. 

The use of non-toxic, natural materials, including our raw wood finish and sheep’s wool insulation, alongside triple-glazing, assisted in the objective of reducing the project’s whole life carbon and achieving high-performing insulation. 

The project stands as a proof of concept for how future housing could be delivered: through a distributed network of empowered self-builders, supported by safe, effective and simple construction solutions.

We returned to complete the Box House Extension project in 2024, where the adaptability of the U-Build system was used to carefully enhance and expand the existing space without waste or damage.

As featured on ‘Grand Designs: The Street’
Box House was selected as one of ten pilot homes for Channel 4’s Grand Designs: The Street (Season 1, Episode 4), airing on 25th April 2019. The episode is available to watch on Channel 4. You can also read about the project on Grand Designs Magazine, which describes Box House as ‘strikingly contemporary, cost-effective and part of a pioneering community of self-builders in rural Oxfordshire’.