‘No more energy bills’: Housebuilder adopts Finnish timber system touted as better than Passivhaus

Housebuilder Oakmont Contracting has decided to build its schemes using a panellised timber system developed by Finnish company Talo 48 years ago and used widely since across the Nordics.

Oakmont founder and executive director Michael Tame told CM he expects to be able to finish developments in half the time conventional builds take, cutting through the Gordian knot of high land, labour, material and borrowing costs.

Talo says its system, developed over four decades, is manufactured from slow-grown, Nordic timber kept fully dry from forest to site, which prevents warping and heat loss.

It says its homes exceed Passivhaus energy and air-tightness specifications as standard and at no cost premium, meaning occupants would face “no energy bills”, or minimal ones.

The system also removes the need to dig foundations owing to its method of achieving ground-bearing capacity.

Both the timber superstructure system and the lightweight foundations approach have ICW Endorsed accreditation from ICW Group, one of the UK’s biggest structural insurance warranty specialists.

Oakmont is using the Talo system on a five-unit high-end development of five-bed homes at Chinnor Hill in Oxfordshire and on a 20-home development in a walled garden near Farnborough due to start in April.

At earlier stages are a 20-unit scheme near Crawley in West Sussex and a 55-unit scheme, subject to planning, at Finchampstead near Woking in Berkshire.

“The crux of it is, land and building costs are high,” said Tame. “Values aren’t increasing, so the market isn’t moving in terms of your GDV [gross development value]. The construction cost is ever-growing, and we’ve certainly seen it since the Ukraine war, when nickel went through the roof.

“Those sorts of building costs are prohibitive, and what we were looking at is, if they’re not moving, how do we bring the overall development cost down?

“If we’ve got to borrow the money over a year, 18 months, two years at 10-12%, sometimes higher than that, if we build in half the time, you could save hundreds of thousands of pounds looking at just the borrowing costs. I think that was the initial trigger for us to dive deeper into this partnership.”

Dr Anthony Greer is executive director of Talo UK, a subsidiary to the Finnish parent that he co-founded eight years ago. He said the business is driven by one mission – to eradicate fuel poverty in new housing.

“We do that by providing a housing solution to people like Mike, to registered providers, to councils, where the occupants need never have an energy bill again and, importantly, we do that cost-competitively with today’s traditional housing,” he said, adding that the system gives developers complete design freedom.

“The superstructure is from Finland, and they’ve been driven over the last 48 years of doing this, where it’s minus 50ºC in the winter, plus 30ºC in the summer, and it really matters if your house is well insulated.

“So there’s a million micro decisions within this that change the outcomes and it’s the outcome focus that I think that really matters. Our minds are always on who’s going to live in this home and what we can do to improve that for them.

“It’s pointless us coming along and saying, would you like to buy our panels? That’s not outcome-focused – it’s a product focus, hoping your product fits. And if you’re trying to disrupt a market, that’s not the way to go about it.

“So we’ve looked at the other parts that sit around our superstructure.”

That includes the Talo foundation system, about which the company declined to talk specifically except to say it takes a fraction of the time, uses 90% less concrete, and saves tens of thousands of pounds.

“The way we do foundations in the UK is typically you dig a trench and fill it with concrete,” Greer said.

“That’s obviously exposed to weather risk because if it rains, your trench is full. Many sites now are brownfield, greyfield, or contaminated, so your muck-away cost is an absolute fortune.

“So we spent five years bringing in a different way of doing this, a different methodology. It’s fully certified, fully insured, fully engineered, where you never dig into the ground.

“This isn’t micro gains, they’re macro gains – they really affect what the cost profile looks like.”

Greer said the Talo process keeps the timber dry from the moment a felled tree enters the sawmill, where it’s kiln-dried after being sawn into shape. He called this the “bedrock” of Talo’s quality control.

Panels are sealed in plastic even during the early assembly stage on site.

“The number of times I’ve seen timber frame houses going down the motorway in the rain not covered – it makes me weep when I see that,” he said.

“It’s hard to buy timber in the UK from the general market that’s not got wet. This timber is stable. It’s a dry piece of timber that doesn’t change. That’s beautiful, because that now means your walls are straight, they’re true.”