January 2000. Swindon’s Abbey Meads, a 2000-plus homes battlefield in its last phases. Migrants to the jobs market wait six months from deposit to move in or buy from speculators stagging reserved units - classic top-of-the-cycle conditions. With Barnes’ “London problem” in mind, I visited Barratt, Westbury and Prowting.
The front elevation of Barratt’s terrace of three linked units was still sending the intended signals, but the surrounding sea of mud, police cones and cheaply-made health and safety notices lazily slung from Herras fencing were shameless to the point of alarming. Westbury was able to manage a neat site (mostly) and Prowting’s outlet was a phenomenon - the health and safety signage on the site compound round the corner was a custom-made feature proudly supporting Prowting’s copyline promises about commitment and “quality matters”. The Prowting site showed attention to quality in unexpected places, such as subcontractors’ parking ringfenced for security and clean enough to walk through in slippers. Partnering in action? The fact that Prowting had better car parking for subcontractors than Barratt had for customers was pressed home when one of Barratt’s site team interrupted my show home tour to make me move my car from the visitors’ parking so he could move his.
The late 1990s has seen many homebuilders rethink logos and corporate identities to catch up with the younger, fresher graphics and style of the High Street. Coley Porter Bell’s modernisation of Westbury, so distinctive and so young, must be both the brightest and most memorable. But since introduction in 1996, there have been problems, notably lack of storage in the sales outlets. Where do you put samples of kitchen cupboard doors? Leaning them against the windows seems to be a common solution and it doesn’t look too smart from inside or outside. Westbury is to address this with new carousels but there is another potentially more damaging weakness. The sales boards and signage are on simple timbers painted in Westbury’s blue. Walk round the back of the bright posters and they look rough and ready made - will the homes be too? They are also easily vandalised or accidentally broken.
Barratt’s logo, the best known, was unrecognisable on becalmed flags. By contrast, Prowting has dumped flags for laminated plastic boards that fixed between reusable aluminium posts to make a convex shield. It’s a custom-made system designed by Prowting’s consultant Phoenix, with the plastic board replaced after each use - colour signage cannot deal with UV-damage. It looked smart, understated and a million miles removed from the secondhand car lot-type signals that a battery of cheap flags transmit.
As for the homes, anyone who hasn’t yet seen Prowting’s Village collection, launched in March 1999, has missed an inspired development. Prowting used Phoenix to focus group more than 1000 people, about half their own buyers and half those who had bought from others, to draw up parameters for a brief for big-name architects Broadway Malyan. The brief, mostly a homebuyers’ likes and dislikes, gave the practice enough insight into the end user’s demands for it to satisfy them with its design skill in layout and externals.
The resulting range, more than 30 new house types, many with various elevational treatments such as rendered or clay tiled gabled frontages to maximise “Village” variety, sit comfortably together and are strikingly more honest in historic detailing - no ragbag of styles and eras, no finials and Vicwardian bolt-ons.
Internally, one of Prowting’s key departures is that customers are not interrogated across a desk by a sales negotiator. They are invited in, then later directed to “lounge” on their own away from the negotiator’s office in a marketing suite with its “Village” model and cosy armchairs just as found in any half-decent country house hotel. During my visit, the negotiator offered tea, help and advice, but no questions. It was a charming experience.
Back at Barratt, I found no sales negotiator and a half-dressed show home which inadvertently highlighted some of the product’s scrimping, such as no space in the bathroom for a loo-roll holder and the lack of any shower, not even on the bath taps - a slap in the face for modern lifestyles. I liked Barratt’s steel front door with the lock securing hidden bolts top and bottom but it was a feature waiting to be sold, not least to a single female buyer. Opening the next door from hallway to living room walloped a radiator behind. This is a common problem which Prowting has addressed with special stops. Barratt simply left some doors off and such low aspirations continued into its kitchens where the layout and worktops ignore any (probable) desire for one of today’s taller fridge-freezers.
Prowting’s biggest failing were radiators that you clearly couldn’t vacuum round without damaging - spot the damage.
That leaves Westbury. The semiotics say this is a builder to visit if you are thirty-something or less - trendy graphics, images of young families. Inside, the houses suggest they are for Great Auntie Mabel. Hallways with etched glass and gilt frames to vie with the Palais de Versailles. Apricot or peach throughout! This contrast between message and product was clearest in the matronly ensuite bedroom where those hip flags hung outside windows draped with toile and set off by brassy candelabras. The message doesn’t fit the presentation.
So, the final placings: Prowting is a thoroughbred forcing the pace, Westbury all fits and starts in the chasing pack and Barratt selling pony rides on the beach. And, sooner or later, the tide must turn.
Source
Building Homes
