Traditional enough to blend into the streetscene at the front; clad in radical curvy glazing at the back, this is Mullion Homes’ prototype for its future product.
Michael McCarthy didn’t set up Mullion Homes because he wanted to redesign the garage door; his remit is to develop intelligent homes. But the strictures surrounding his first scheme, the conversion of Cotswold barns and outbuildings at Bibury Stud in Gloucestershire, meant usual methods and materials did not apply. Standard up-and-over garage doors did not have what it takes to satisfy planners or allow enough height to get the ubiquitous chunky Cotswold four-wheel drive into the garage, so McCarthy came up with a side-sliding, electrically-driven, robustly agricultural-looking version that complied with the company’s intelligent homes philosophy, met the needs of its Land Rover-driving buyers and passed the scrutiny of the conservationist planners.

Time and again on this first small scheme the company has found its aim to produce homes that are “flexible, spacious and sophisticated” has not been compatible with the confined Cotswold cottage or equally confining Cotswold planners. “Bibury has been great to explore R&D, and we have had some good ideas, but ultimately we have been constrained by the existing buildings,” sums up md McCarthy. The company ended up directing its innovatory skills to dealing with niggling problems like garage doors. It has had to individually design-to-fit each of the converted homes’ Mullion trademark smart spaces - flexible rooms fitted with a fold-down bed and table, desk, shelves and washbasin. The effort has taken time and resulted in high-cost end-products - homes at Bibury are selling at well over £500 000. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if Mullion started with a bare site and a blank sheet of paper?

That is exactly what the housebuilder is doing, but it is going further than simply producing dedicated designs for a site. It is devising a set of Mullion houses, all four-bedroom, 2000 ft2 detached units, that could be built anywhere in the country and blend with the vernacular of the location.

McCarthy says that his Mullion houses will be very different to most homebuilders’ concept of the standard housetype. For starters the design expertise behind the model range comes not from an in-house design department but from the architect of Windsor Castle’s post-fire refurbishment, Giles Downes of Sidell Gibson Partnership, who was planning architect for Bibury Stud. Downes has brought in the Windsor project team of mechanical and electrical engineer Cundall Johnston, structural engineer Cameron Taylor Bedford and quantity surveyor Citex Bucknall Austin to work up the Mullion prototypes.

“We’ve spent a year testing this on costs and other aspects. We needed a house that was adaptable aesthetically to win the argument with any planning authority,” says McCarthy. The Mullion house therefore comes in a variety of elevational treatments for its front - the company has come up with nine variations so far, including urban town house, suburban model, and riverside house. The variations are not achieved by simply swapping windows and brick colours; the suburban model has a conventional gabled frontage, while a version called restoration has Georgian influences.

But while the house’s fronts are camouflaged for the streetscene, the houses have identical, and unconventional rear elevations: a two-storey glass curvilinear wall. All the homes will also be built using the same timber framing, expected to be sourced from St Austell-based Thermotec.

Common to all of the Mullion models will be open, free-flowing living space. At first floor level, there are three double bedrooms with ensuites and an open gallery along the glazed elevation; the fourth bedroom is on the ground floor. All technology currently incorporated in the Bibury homes will be there, including the smart space, although the model allows the housebuilder to make the room and its furniture combination more formulaic than the smart spaces at Bibury. There will also be two significant extras: recycling of rainwater for toilet flushing and solar panels. More innovation could easily be incorporated; the housebuilder has not really started to exploit the potential of the home automation systems it fits. “It is in providing home entertainment that these systems really come into their own, and that is what you would find in a US home, but there is not the market for it yet here,” says McCarthy.

The homebuilder is preparing to build the first prototype Mullion house at Brackley Lodge in Brackley, Northamptonshire. For this site the house will have a Georgian frontage, to match adjacent grade two listed buildings which Mullion is refurbishing, but the rear elevation will have the curved glass facade that promises to become something of unique selling proposition.

Mullion is also in the final stages of devising a cheaper, smaller version of its prototype. It is currently looking for potential sites, and is interested in finding like-minded joint venture partners to help put its ideas into practice. Any takers?

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Building Homes