Aire 8100

Aire 8100. It sounds like a car model or mobile phone. The technocratic name for the range of homes to be built at Allerton Bywater is derived from the 8100 mm plot width adopted as the village standard for houses. The distinctive wide frontage of the homes will allow for flexibility and privacy, say the scheme designers, but it is also an integral part of the village's environmentally sustainable design.

The Aire 8100 range of 12 houses comprises three sizes of dwelling - two, three and four-bedders - for each of the four orientations on site. By selecting a housetype according to its position on the site, the team will be able to maximise solar gain and give home occupants large expanses of glazing along at least one of the wide front and rear elevations.

There are other common characteristics to the range. All have room volumes and floor-to-ceiling heights that would be considered generous by current speculative developer standards. All houses can be used for both living and working, with the potential for a "hot desk" IT station to be sited in the ground floor hallway. All homes are also designed for internal flexibility and for extendability at the rear.

Aire Regeneration Partnership's strategy is set to turn Allerton Bywater into a byword for innovation in home production. The village's existing under-tenanted industrial estate has been suggested as a perfect location for a factory making modular precast concrete wall elements for the homes. Transporting raw materials to the village and producing the components close to site will use significantly less energy than transporting completed elements from a remote factory, calculates the partnership, and it also helps to make the village's community more sustainable by providing local employment.

The team is looking to partner with suppliers early in the development process, and wants to work with UK companies that could help to bring new skills and jobs to Allerton Bywater. Provision of more than 400 jobs by completion is a firm commitment, and there are plans to establish a one-stop shop to coordinate the employment opportunities.

Construction of the millennium community has been divided into 63 development modules, which will be implemented by a number of developers. Modules 1-36 take the community through its first phase of development (see Mix of homes fact file). Throughout the five-year build programme the principles of the village and of Aire Design's masterplan will be applied through a set of design guidelines.

The partnership has set relatively few hard and fast build targets for Allerton Bywater, probably a sensible course of action considering that Greenwich Millennium Team is still battling to live up to the long and ambitious list of claims it made for the first millennium village. But the targets that Aire Regeneration Partnership has set are more stringent than those of Greenwich, recognising that the first millennium village's standards should be benchmarks to be improved upon (see Build targets fact file). The team is looking to factory production processes not only to increase efficiency but also to maximise build quality, and like Greenwich it hopes to equip homes with an extended warranty of 30 years.

Homes will be constructed directly onto the colliery site's remediation layer and will have precast concrete system foundations. Concrete and timber will be the materials for the basic kit of parts for both houses and apartments. Timber, stone, terracotta and render are all being cited as possible cladding options, echoing the stone, brick and render of existing homes. Pitched roofs will provide another visual link with Allerton Bywater's past, but they will be brought up to date with solar panels.

The thermal mass of the concrete construction, high insulation levels, solar orientation and technology like solar panels are all expected to result in very low energy bills for home occupants. Energy consumption for a three-bed Aire 8100 house is predicted to be 15 kWh/m² a year, around six times less than the consumption of a same-sized semi built to current Building Regulations.

Scheme design is now being developed with a view to work starting on site by early next year. If the programme runs smoothly, Yorkshire buyers could be making their reservations for homes in the second millennium community next year, at virtually the same time as Londoners sign up to the first.