Luxury Beach Huts, Dorset

 

The Challenge:

Create beautiful beach huts with a long lifespan and low maintenance requirements in an exposed location.

 

The Back Story:

A crystal blue seascape and golden sand make up Mudeford Sandspit in East Dorset – home to some of Britain’s most expensive luxury beach huts.

Off the Isle of Wight and a ferry ride from civilisation, the huts are a little piece of heaven for beachgoers who want a quiet trip and immersive nature experience. Private clients commission SAM’s customer Ecologic Developments to rebuild beach huts on the spit.

But on a sea-locked spit of land, how do you create and transport something that’s beautiful, functional, and also long-lasting in weather that can be more than occasionally temperamental?

Arriving at the Mudeford sandspit is a journey too: getting there requires a 30-minute trek on foot, a ride on a novelty Noddy train (how good is that?) or a short ferry trip.

Complicating matters further is that Mudeford is a delicate site near an SSI – a special site of scientific interest. Pete Samson and the team in Ecologic Developments need to get their huts from the off-site base through an ancient woodland and all the way back to Mudeford.

 

The Solution:

Getting it right requires impressive logistics and an even more impressive building material. Which is exactly why Pete and his five-man team chose SAM Trimax.

A year ago, Ecologic Developments made the decision to clad entirely with SAM Trimax for the longevity, stability, and peace of mind. With a full off-site construction system making the spine of their builds, Ecologic Developments used SAM Trimax to maximise productivity without any risk to the six-week build from the weather.  Pete commented:

“We chose SAM Trimax for the peace of mind.  It’s got that longevity. We impart that knowledge to our customers and really allow them to make a conscious decision that they’re using a product that’s not only made through a non-toxic, sustainable process, but something that’s going to pay dividends in the long run in terms of lack of maintenance and looking good.”

Durable and high-quality, SAM Trimax was the perfect choice, especially compared to timber, a cement-based cladding, or UPVC cladding.

A further challenge for Samson’s team comes in getting the fully finished huts on site.

Standard-sized huts make the trek on a low-bedded lorry, but extra-wide huts can’t fit through the ancient woodland on a nature reserve through which the sandspit is accessed. The team devised a novel journey involving a locally-commissioned barge. A finished hut is tied to the back of a low-loader and down to a slipway where it’s craned onto one of the barges and then dragged down the river to complete the journey.

This year, Ecologic Developments have fitted 342 long lengths of profiled shiplap cladding to their builds, and they’ve been so impressed with the swap to SAM Trimax that Pete recommends it for all their high exposure area projects.

 

The Result:

The residents have noticed the difference in quality.  Pete informed us:

“The feedback we’ve had so far from all the local community is that our huts are a cut above the rest.  Undeniably one of the main factors in that is the neatness, uniformity, and the crisp look you can achieve with the SAM Trimax cladding”.

The profiles used for this project are made to order and minimum order quantities apply.

➡ Cladding – SAM3907 12mm x 294mm lengths (unfinished)

(The client painted the cladding in their offsite manufacturing facility)

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