Homebuilders are expert at selling a vision of Britain, but why does the product on offer invariably shun Habitat for Laura Ashley? Josephine Smit looks into housing’s black hole - the contemporary.
With bow-like curves and conning towers, all in ocean-liner white, Barratt’s Pierhead Lock in London Docklands could almost be HMS Cool Britannia. She is, after all, rising fast from a spot close by Canary Wharf, where New Labour paraded its modernity by getting Sir Terence Conran to style last year’s Anglo-French summit. But look through the windows at Pierhead Lock’s show apartments. There you will see a more familiar story - Austrian blinds and twinkling yellow-metal chandeliers replicated from a home counties estate.

Culture clashes like these can be seen on almost every housebuilder’s site. Whether it is the clean lines of modern apartments obscured with coving and a ceiling rose, or contemporary beech and chrome kitchens teamed with brass light plates, such mismatches are a manifestation of housebuilders’ own inner struggle when faced by the prospect of breaking with what the 1980s taught them - the majority of buyers hanker for a bit of low-maintenance repro.

As for the minority, Barratt is one of even fewer firms adventurous enough to have exteriors designed in the modern idiom for houses like Rosemont Mews in London’s suburb of Finchley. But now, outside of village England, housebuilders are being told to ditch the finials and half timbering by Government.

The Urban Task Force has a modernist agenda under the determinedly modernist leadership of Lord Rogers, while in the competitions for millennium village sites it is now almost a requirement for bidding developers to go out on an architectural, if not a commercial, limb.

Housebuilders, of course, are not necessarily free to shape what they sell. “There’s the conservatism of the planners, the Building Regulations and the buyers,” says professor James Barlow, of the University of Westminster. “But I am not sure,” he adds, “how far they have become excuses for housebuilders’ own inaction.”

“Developers don’t try anything different,” is the blunt opinion of Nick Johnson, director of Urban Splash Homes, the division established by north-west urban apartment developer Urban Splash to fill a vacuum. Johnson believes that housebuilders are underestimating the homebuying public’s appetite for modern design. “I think it is more than a niche market. A 10% market share would be a significant number of homes,” he says.

Urban Splash Homes is gearing up to take that market share by applying the housebuilder’s formula of a mass market product at an effective build cost to a new build site in Manchester, Britannia Basin, which was the subject of a design competition for an apartment scheme. It is looking for other new build sites, possibly to include modern-looking houses. Says Johnson: “We found that where we led with city schemes, mass market developers followed, so we have decided to take the game back to them. We want to produce a more cosmopolitan architecture than chintz. We want to give freedom of choice and I think we’ll find people will want it.”

If housebuilders again follow in Urban Splash’s footsteps, they are likely to tread more warily. Wates Built Homes made a commitment to modernising house design in its prime marketplace, through its Project House 2000 project. So far the project has carried out research, and held a design competition, Living Sites, which won three young architects the chance to design homes for an upcoming Wates site in West Malling, Kent, last June. But it is still not certain whether the architects’ winning ideas of houses with glazed elevations, timber louvres and a home office in the garden will actually be built at the site.

“We are having an in-depth survey that will help to create the brief for the architect,” says Alan Cosh, land and planning director at Wates Built Homes. “It is a complex type of research looking at the people who will live there and what would attract them to live at the site.” And if research shows that people want Austrian blinds, coving and brass light plates, the housebuilder could be in a dilemma.

The devil is in the detail

One demand on estate housing design is not for modernity but for better detailing. Research undertaken by the Popular Housing Forum with housebuilders’ support last year, summed up in the report Kerb Appeal, found the general public critical of new housing as boxy, cramped and homogenous. However, they still wanted fairly conventional external designs that would “fit” into the streetscape. Improving design is the platform for the Popular Housing Forum’s conference in London on 17 May. But raising quality, whatever the architectural style, is far from easy, admits Robert Adam, neo-classical architect and founder of the Forum. “The big obstacle is land allocation and site assembly. While there is undersupply, discretionary issues like design will not be important. Getting hold of the site for the housebuilder, or the house for the buyer, takes precedence.” And while Lord Rogers’ Urban Task Force may raise design quality for the 60% of new homes built on recycled sites, Adam fears for the rest. “Research shows that people don’t want to live in the city, so by trying to force people to live in towns, contrary to the market, the government will make the most desirable product even more scarce. You come back to the argument that if you don’t have choice you get a Trabant. The quality of greenfield development could get worse.”

Source

Building Homes