The Apricot Centre

Since 2009, The Apricot Centre CIC has combined organic and biodynamic growing with agricultural training and a therapeutic wellbeing service, moving to its current 34-acre site at Huxhams Cross Farm - held on a 999-year lease by the Biodynamic Land Trust - in 2015, when the original training centre building was consented under application 0632/17/FUL. From here, the team now run a full annual training programme spanning Permaculture Design Certificates, biodynamic and agroforestry courses and a new School for Regenerative Land Based Studies, alongside therapy and care-farming sessions, school visits for local children, weekly volunteer days and a busy veg box and Totnes Friday market trade that feeds well over 150 families a year. Nine full-time and several part-time staff work from the farm - a scale of activity that had outgrown the modest training and office building built to support it.

Rather than build a large new structure, our design maximises the use of what already existed. A careful reworking of the existing interior layout and a single-storey extension - limited to 6 metres - is added along its west side, tucked between the training centre and the neighbouring therapy cabin. The extension is deliberately designed to defer to the host building: its ridge is lowered so it reads as a subservient addition rather than competing with the original form, and the existing timber cladding, external doors and windows removed from the west elevation are reused within the new extension itself, alongside salvaged stud work and internal doors taken from partitions removed elsewhere in the building. The material palette - timber cladding, profiled metal roofing and simple, timber-framed construction - closely matches the existing agricultural buildings on the farm, so the whole training centre continues to read against the backdrop of the barns and polytunnels around it.

Sustainability sits at the heart of both The Apricot Centre's mission and our brief. The new fabric is designed to Passivhaus principles, modelled using the Passive House Planning Package, with high levels of insulation, an airtight, thermal-bridge-free construction targeting Passivhaus EnerPHit performance standard as far as possible. Timber-frame construction with cellulose, wood fibre and sheep's wool insulation keeps embodied carbon low, with FSC-certified timber sourced as locally as practical and the use of concrete in the foundations minimised; virtually nothing from the existing building went to landfill, with materials reused, composted or retained on site to create wildlife habitat instead. A new timber pergola with a polycarbonate covering along the south elevation provides solar shading in summer and a rain shelter all year round, cutting the risk of overheating while still allowing useful solar gain through the winter months.

Water and ecology were treated with equal care. Rainwater from the enlarged roof continues to feed the farm's existing storage tank and irrigation pond, low-flow fittings and a composting WC reduce demand further, and grey water is filtered through a small reed bed before it soaks away - all connecting into drainage arrangements already established on the site. An ecology survey found no active bat roosts within the building, but a bat box was still installed on its east gable as a precautionary biodiversity gain, and no trees or hedges were affected by the works.

The building remains fully accessible throughout, with ramped, level-threshold entrances, generous door widths and clear circulation supporting the wide range of people who train, volunteer and receive therapeutic support on the farm. Completed in June 2025, the extension gives a hard-working and much-loved rural social enterprise the space it needs to keep doing the amazing work it does.