What we build
Building a farmhouse or country home
Building on land is a different job from building in town. There is usually no mains water, often no power at the boundary, and the access road decides half your logistics. It is also the most rewarding kind of house to build, because the site actually gets to shape the design.
Services come first, not last
On a town plot you connect to what is already there. On a farm you build it. Water, waste, power and the road in are four separate projects that have to be solved before the house is worth designing in detail, and they can add two to four million shillings on their own.
We would rather tell you that at the first site visit than halfway through the walls.
- Water: roof harvesting into tanks, a borehole, or a delivered supply
- Waste: septic tank and soakpit, or a biodigester where the ground does not soak
- Power: Kenya Power if a transformer is near, otherwise solar with battery storage
- Access: a murram road and a turning area that a fully loaded lorry can use
Designing for the site
The wind on the Laikipia plains is a design input, not a detail. So is the low morning sun, the direction of the long rains and where the cattle walk. A house that faces the view but ignores the wind is cold and noisy for half the year.
We use stone because it is local, it holds warmth overnight at this altitude and it looks like it belongs. Timber ceilings and floors do the same job for the inside.
Questions we get asked
- Do I need county approval to build on my own farm?
- Yes. Rural land still falls under the county and the Physical and Land Use Planning Act. Building without approval risks a stop order, and it makes the property difficult to sell, mortgage or insure later.
- Should I drill a borehole or harvest rain?
- Get a hydrogeological survey before you commit, because depth to water varies enormously over short distances around Laikipia. Many plots do better on a large roof, good gutters and 30,000 to 50,000 litres of storage, topped up by delivery in a dry year. A borehole is a permanent asset when the survey is good, and a very expensive dry hole when it is not.
Also worth reading
Bungalows
A bungalow is everything on one level. It is the most common house built in Kenya and usually the cheapest way to get a given number of bedrooms, because there is no staircase, no suspended slab and no second scaffold.
Maisonettes
A maisonette is a house on two or three floors with its own entrance. It is what people build when the plot is small, when the view is worth reaching for, or when they simply want the bedrooms separate from the living space.
Planning a farmhouse or country home?
Tell us the plot and roughly what you have in mind. We will come and look, then give you an itemised figure and a programme.