The only way is up

It is impossible for every brownfield site to be filled with apartment blocks. That realisation, coupled with regulation, is leading housebuilders to look to the past. “If you take the updating of DB32, things like the new Essex Design Guide, the increasing awareness of design issues and the rejection of the cul de sac, there is a move to traditional urban forms,” says Peter Phippen, director of PRP Architects. “If you add to that the need to do something about car parking. Then you are talking about two and three-storey townhouses with cars parked around the back or within the house shell.”

This message is being picked up by housebuilders working on brownfield sites around the country and interpreted with everything from faithful copies of Georgian townhouses to modern reinventions of the form. Variations on the townhouse theme range from tight two-storey terraces to three-storey models that use the roofspace, perhaps as a mews-style mansard, and four-storey versions with semi-basements.

The townhouse is accepted as an efficient way of developing a site. It also squeezes maximum floor space out of a unit, something which Phippen says is an increasing priority for private developers.

“With townhouses you can give buyers a good square footage,” acknowledges Ian Hughes, sales and marketing director of St James Homes, which is developing traditional townhouses at St James Park in Long Ditton, Surrey. How that square footage is organised when you have an integral garage at ground floor, however, is a moot point for housebuilders. Some put a kitchen/family room on the ground floor, others a flexible combination of a wc/utility room/ family room.

The company has both options on offer at St James Park, and is finding both sell equally well. Townhouse sales are outnumbering apartments and conventional houses at the site.

Swan Hill Homes tested the townhouse integrated parking formula and its buyer appeal three years ago with its Port Solent development. “We used every bit of space, and got a large number of houses into a smaller area,” says managing director David Truslove. “They are efficient in terms of site coverage, but work in progress is quite high,” he adds.

But Truslove says townhouses are not an urban panacea. “The difficulty is where local authorities want affordable housing. We can’t provide the density to deliver affordable housing. Townhouses are not affordable,” he points out.

“They also provide a certain type of accommodation. You don’t get the same revenue per square foot. There is probably a discount of a third on the extra space.”

Gleeson Homes director Clive Wilding believes discounting only affects certain types of townhouse, especially the design style made popular in the 1960s and 1970s.

“It was a garage with a house on top, and that’s not acceptable. Now they are proper three-storey houses,” he says. “Urban environments don’t let you go outwards with a house so you have to go upwards.”

Wilding believes there is scope for townhouse designs to break with Georgian traditions and become more innovative. It is working with an architect on a site in Manchester. “We are actively looking for a new style of terraced house,” says Wilding.

Which is exactly what Liverpool-based developer Urban Splash is looking for with its competition for architects “to reinvent the mass produced private house”. Bet you, come April, the winner is a townhouse.