THIS unique award-winning home that was once a water pumping station has gone on the market for £1.375million.

Described as a home for the future, the owners have turned the abandoned Art Deco Nutbourne pumping station into a light and airy living space with low energy consumption.

Now known as Nutbourne Studios, its open-plan design features two connecting 46ft-wide rooms: a sitting room/library room and a kitchen/dining room.

The sitting room has high ceilings and there’s a series of skylights, while the acoustics are described as “fabulous” and dark floor tiles contrast with the white walls. In the basement are two rooms used as a games room but which could be converted into a cinema, gym, recording studio or wine cellar.

The house is ‘A’ rated for eco-efficiency and self-sufficient in supplying electricity for cooking, heating, lighting and hot water. It generates a cash return for renewable energy by selling spare capacity back to the National Grid, and among its many energy-saving features are a high level of insulation, ground source heat pump, underfloor heating and solar panels.

The conversion has won five awards, including the 2011 Sussex Heritage Trust Best House Award for its innovative and eco-friendly design and use of space, and was featured on the BBC programme Restoration House, which described the original building as ‘an industrial-size bunker full of rusting, redundant, heavy duty machinery’.

The 12-month project to convert the derelict building, which supplied clean fresh water to thousands of local residents between the 1930s to the 1970s, was a labour of love for owners Nick and Brigitte Sweet.

They bought Nutbourne pumping station at Nutbourne Common in Pulborough for £269,000 in 2010 after Brigitte, who is originally from Sussex, first spotted it.

“Brigitte found it, and when we visited, we were excited by the scale and sense of space and light,” explained Nick, a partner in an urban design consultancy.

They also discovered that the building had a history. Dr Kate Williams, the resident Restoration House programme’s historian, discovered that the pumping station was built as a result of a typhoid outbreak in Worthing in the 1890s with similar fears resurfacing for the residents of Nutbourne in the 1930s. “Nowadays we take clean water for granted,” Dr Williams said. “But when this place was opened in 1932, it was the harbinger of a brave new world.”

So the Sweets, who have 11-year-old twins, Willem and Francesca, decided to keep some original features when they started their 12-month project to convert it into a 5,000 square foot five-bedroom home.

“We saw it as both a project and as a family home,” said Nick. “In our view, even a family home had to stack up commercially.”

Described as “a little oasis” tucked away at the end of a private unmade road and screened by trees and shrubs, the house has every mod con: satellite broadband, wifi network, Sonos sound system, automatic external lighting, external power points for hybrid/electric vehicles, 30sq metre rainwater storage facility, independent thermostatic controls in each room, skylight venting and Italian-designed low energy lighting.

“We don’t want to leave,” said Nick. “But the children have been offered places at Wellington College and needs must: the kids come first. We plan to return and settle in Arundel.

“As a measure of the house, it is astonishing how many kids who visit then refuse to leave.”

The house is being sold through Savills estate agents. Spokesman Daniel Clay, who is based at Savills in Petworth, said the house would work well as a family home or for a London family “seeking the ultimate ‘lockupandleave' party house for weekends”. It has planning consent for an annexe or studio.

For more details about Nutbourne Studios, contact Savills on 01798 343111.