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Q&A: Chris Warner, Castlethorpe Homes

Castlethorpe Homes is a small, SME housebuilder covering Oxfordshire, the Cotswolds and the surrounding counties. We visited one of its sites to chat to Chris Warner, Founder and Managing Director.

Tell us about Castlethorpe Homes

Castlethorpe Homes builds smaller, more bespoke developments in those areas that are all different but all based on quality, sustainability and community, that’s our ethos.

Today we’re at Willowside Grange which is five new homes – a farmhouse barn, two semi detached cottages and some unusual Dutch barns that we built from new, so this typifies the quality of what we like to bring to the location as a community and the sustainability measures that we fit as a feature of our new homes.

How important is sustainability to Castlethorpe Homes?

At Castlethorpe Homes we use a range of sustainability features depending on the development. Here at Willowside Grange, we have solar panels on the roof, air source heat pumps, waste water heat recovery and then obviously EV chargers from Ohme.

As a business we like to partner with other companies that share the same kind of ethos as we do. With Ohme we get great support, we get great products and importantly for our customers it’s important that they get the best that’s on the market. When it comes to sustainability, you need to partner with companies that share the same views and values that you do, so I think it’s important to work with some like Ohme that understands and shares our passion.

Are your customers aware of the sustainability measures that you feature on your homes? 

We tend to see an expanding number of buyers are becoming more and more switched on to sustainability. Therefore they have a good understanding of things like air source heat pumps and EV chargers, so I think it’s really important that we as a company also know what’s new in the market and what’s the very best that we can offer.

Our customers have become much more aware over the last 5-10 years there’s been a sea-change of difference of knowledge of people coming and asking questions relating to our sustainability features or the products we’re using or our specification for example.

The features are also becoming more of a selling point as the market becomes more aware. Ten years ago, the questions would have been dominated on location and price and now people are asking us whether the Ohme charger will charge their car, what’s the cost of living implications and the savings they will make, so we take all of these things into account when we’re bringing new products and sustainability measures into our new homes.

Why did you choose Ohme? 

When we were looking for an EV charging partner, we were looking for the functionality that suits our customers. It needed to be easy to install for our electrical subcontractors which is a good thing, but from the perspective of both our customers and us, one of the stand-out things with Ohme is the support we get from the office.

We like that support to be an extension of our business, so if you have an EV now, that’s great you can use the charger straight away, but if not and you’re intending on having an EV in the future, Ohme’s chargers have a built-in SIM card and we really like that. You might be in the house for two years, then buy an EV and decide you want to use it, so you can just activate the charger and use all of the Ohme’s features straight away.

You can find out more about Castlethorpe Homes here and full details of the services that Ohme offers to housebuilder and property developers here.