Demonstrator
Case Study
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The Dell Cabin

A demonstrator cabin was built in Dartington, Devon, using the Wikihouse system. It was led by Woodlab with the structural design supported by OSL and manufacturing by Maahee’s and UoP.

WikiHouse Devon

Named ‘The Dell’, the cabin will serve as an educational facility within the local Staverton woodland. The cabin is a dedicated space for groups of Special Educational Needs (SEN) children to be able to experience the forest and receive the support they need to do so. This design offers a timber-based, adaptable, and versatile space to be used for a large range of activities. Approximately 20 children per week will benefit from the site across different sessions, and engage with self-directed learning, supported by the woodland and dedicated staff.

A person working on a wooden deck outside a modern house with wooden siding and large glass sliding doors, in a wooded area.
Stacked logs of cut wood with visible tree rings and bark.
A person working on building a wooden deck outside a modern house with a wooden exterior and large glass sliding doors, surrounded by greenery and trees.
Scenic countryside with rolling hills, scattered trees, and a cloudy sky.
Interior of a room under construction with unfinished wooden walls, a window, and a glass door, overlooking trees and bushes outside.
Close-up of a metal roof overhang with wooden support and gutters, with trees in the background.
A stack of cut logs in a rural landscape with rolling green hills and fields in the background, under a partly cloudy sky.
A man with dreadlocks and glasses is using a power saw to cut a piece of wood outdoors. He is leaning over the wood, focused on his work, with additional tools nearby and a natural, wooded environment in the background.

The structure embodies the circularity and digital principles developed throughout the project. The production of the primary building components became a testbed for the implementation of the manufacturing control plan and material passport technology. Some blocks have been sourced from a temporary exhibition structure displayed in Whitleigh, Plymouth. The building is made with 240 sheets of UK-grown OSB3, 40m3 of locally-sourced sheep wool insulation, and 1 tonne of larch harvested from the surrounding managed woodland and milled into battens and cladding. The project team have also collaborated with environmental consultants at SCS Partnership to develop a Life-cycle Carbon Assessment (LCA) for the building, from raw materials to end-of-life disposal, utilising metadata captured with the MP including production and transport emissions, and compared with a “brick and block” equivalent design.

The LCA compared the Embodied Carbon between the Dell WikiHouse construction, an equivalent ‘notional’ brick & block building, and the Dell WikiHouse where passported blocks and other suitable materials enter the ‘circular economy’. The key takeaways are that WikiHouse consumes 41% of the Upfront Embodied Carbon (A1-5 ) and 89% of the total Embodied Carbon (A-C) when compared to the Notional Brick and Block building.

Stack of cut logs of wood outdoors with mountains and cloudy sky in the background.

To our knowledge, this is the first UK-based timber building delivered following the “building as material banks” material passport technology.

Meet the Team

  • Red logo of a tent with a dot on top and the word 'MAAHEE'S' beneath it.
  • Text on a black background states, 'Sorry, I can't help with that.'
  • Black rectangle covering the image, obscuring the content.
  • Logo of Forestry Commission featuring a stylized tree and a forest icon in green with the text 'Forestry Commission'
  • University of Plymouth logo with shield emblem and university name in black text.