Inside information about the Brick choice on the Potton Self-Build Showhouse

The working brief from Terry Mahoney at Potton was to bring “The Dream Alive”.

We were presented with a unique opportunity to become one of Potton’s Gold Partners, all we had to do was work out which one of our 200 clay facing bricks would suit the style of Potton’s innovative new house, designed specifically as the centre piece to the National Self Build Centre in Swindon.

After studying the working drawings and visiting many historically similar projects in East Anglia, Hampshire and Wiltshire, we came up with the classic shades of Orange facing bricks that were familiar vernacular on buildings of the late 18th Century.

The short list of bricks included our Warnham Winchester Multi Stock, Warnham Terracotta Stock and Whitchurch Orange Retro. The two Warnham bricks were discounted because of the flatness of their surface when you viewed the sample panels under artificial light. This was most important to recognise as the whole Showhouse will be subject to this condition within the massive shell of the Self-Build Centre.

The next level of discussion surrounded the age that the building should represent, should it look as though it was a new building built from reclaimed materials, a style often repeated by existing Potton customers, or should it look more like an old building built from new materials that would have bee available 100 years ago?
If the reclaimed look was to win favour the Whitchurch Orange Retro would have been the obvious choice as Potton had already chosen this brick for their last Exhibition centre piece at the National Self Build exhibition in Birmingham.

However, we decided that it would be a real innovation to build the façade to replicate original new brickwork and add detail to the brickwork in keeping with knowledge and skill levels available at the turn of the last century, 1900 ad.

Mortar colour was also important to represent the lime mortars of the time mixed with local cream coloured natural sands, rather than the cement based shades of today’s speculative house builders.

Older bricks were always fired in clamps or Hoffman Ring Kilns, each “burn” produced a number of blue or black hard burnt bricks that were built into either chimney stacks or added to the façade to add patterns of the most exclusive dwellings. In fact bricklayer’s used to identify “their handiwork” by the patterns they created on properties they built.

After all the details were discussed, we came up with a plan, the main brickwork should be constructed in Kingswood Orange Multi, a series of brick patterns should be added to contrast with the Orange shades in our Blue Snappers [the name given to brick halves, they are literally snapped in half to form a decorative blue header pattern] and the mortar should not look to grey or mechanical in its profile.

We believe we have helped the Potton architects achieve their dream; we certainly would like to help other self-builders achieve theirs as well.