The appeal of Channel 4’s original Grand Designs programme – still just
discernible amid the remarkable welter of spin-off activities now forming
the franchise – was simple. Ambitiously naive people set out to build their
own homes, suffered trouble and strife along the way, but eventually moved
in and declared themselves delighted, if impoverished. We all imagined
ourselves doing the same. Yes, you can break free from the clammy grip of
the mass-market housebuilders. You can build your own dream home, be the
envy of all your friends and live happily ever after.
The Grand Designs bandwagon rolls ever onwards. Its presenter, Kevin McCloud,
is now a niche developer, filming himself as he builds tasty little estates
in Swindon through his company Hab (Happiness, Architecture, Beauty). Last
week, he blamed his own programme for the rash of “me too” one-off modernist
white-box houses now being built – once fashionable, now a cliché.
Britain’s biggest mass-market housebuilder, Persimmon, meanwhile, has
announced a moratorium on new building sites until market conditions
improve. Sales are plummeting because of the shortage of mortgages, and of
course all the main housebuilders are in much the same boat. We know this,
but is something else going on?
Look at the shortlist for this year’s Grand Designs Home of the Year
competition, which, for the first time, will be shown in a week-long
television extravaganza, starting tonight, with viewers given the chance to
select the winner. These aren’t the best houses I’ve ever seen, but they are
good, individual and varied, with, McCloud will be pleased to hear, not a
white-box cliché among them. They have been built all over the place: on
impossibly tight scraps of city land, in suburbs, in woodland, on islands.
Whether new-builds or conversions, they mostly share an open-plan, modernist
look. They like expensive sliding-glass walls, often with timber cladding.
They are big on framing views. There are also out-and-out eco-homes, the
sort made of lime-rendered straw bales and sheep’s-wool insulation. Just
possibly, the market is telling the mass housebuilders something: could we
have homes that are a lot less humdrum, please?
Okay, so ambitious individualism isn’t the only model. There are a lot of
self-builders out there, people who find a plot of land and fling up a kit
home that looks remarkably like the sort of thing the big housebuilders
produce. There are magazines stuffed with examples to make the fastidious
shudder – fine if that’s what you want. The niche market for adventurous,
architect-designed homes, however, is growing apace. Fifteen or 20 years
ago, few good one-off homes were being constructed.
Today, they’re being built all over the place. However influential, Grand
Designs didn’t start this movement, it just exploited it.
Even the mass housebuilders are beginning – slowly – to take notice. Why else
would Wimpey Homes employ Wayne Hemingway, the former fashion designer, to
impart a touch of glamour to its new estates? When times are tough, you need
something that distinguishes your product from the rest of the stuff out
there. So, the big boys of housebuilding might be able to learn something
from the shortlist – such as using better, eco-conscious designers.
Several of the homes are designed by architects for themselves. Take Marcus
Lee and his family, who live in Hackney, east London. Lee used to work for
Richard Rogers – he spent 11 years on Terminal 5, which might have been why
he left – and now runs his own successful firm. For his own house, he went
for a low-energy timber-framed system.
Having bought a plot of land at the end of a lane for £85,000 in 2000, he
finally got round to creating the Frame House, as it is known, in 2005. It
cost £300,000 and took just four months to build, though Lee admits it
wasn’t quite finished. “We needed to move in quickly, so we camped on the
upper floors. It’s only just finished now, really.” Lee, his wife, Rachel,
and their daughters – Ruby, 10, Jodie, 8, and Mae, 6 – have found the house
adaptable. At first, the girls were together in one big bedroom, but the
house was designed to convert into smaller private bedrooms when required.
This is an update of an ancient way of building – medieval farmers knew all
about timber-framed construction, using solid oak. Lee went for laminated
larch beams, filling in the walls with wattle and daub. He used
high-insulation, compressed wood fibreboard, then added to his
eco-credentials by heating the house with a wood-pellet boiler. Originally,
it was going to be a flat-roofed two-storey house, but then Lee thought, why
not have the equivalent of an attic to convert? So he added a mono-pitched
roof, gaining a long, triangular-section third floor.
With its views out across neighbouring gardens, plenty of natural light and
spacious, slate-floored ground-level living areas, the result is something
of a city oasis – and emphatically not a white modernist box. Hurrah.
Luke Tozer, another architect, applied his ingenuity to a house built in a gap
only 8ft wide – in what was once an alley in Maida Vale, west London. Hence
its name, the Gap House. “It’s the sort of site only an architect would take
on, because of the difficulties,” Tozer says.
With listed buildings on either side, initially sceptical neighbours and no
planning permission, Tozer was taking a big risk when he and his wife,
Charlotte, bought the site in 2005. He got his permission, however,
demolished the cottage, filled the alley with a slender four-storey tower
and made the most of the space where it widens out to 24ft at the back. With
ground-source heat pumps and good insulation, the four-bedroom, low-energy
house cost about £600,000 to build, but the Tozers, both 37, with two young
children, are in it for the long term. “We intend to be here for 18 or 20
years,” he says confidently.
If you think that’s ecofriendly, it’s nothing compared with Penwhilwr, Rachel
Shiamh’s two-storey, lime-rendered straw-bale house in an acre of woodland
in Pembrokeshire. This is a self-sustaining, off-grid home that generates
its own power from solar panels and a wind turbine – although Shiamh, 42, a
former dancer, allows herself a little bottled gas to supplement her
woodburning stove for cooking. She bought the site in 1996 for just £5,000,
later moving into a hut there when a family legacy meant she could build the
house. She moved in less than a year ago. It cost just £70,000, thanks to an
army of volunteer helpers.
Shiamh now lives alone (with dogs and cats), but the house is always busy, as
she uses it to teach green building techniques. Nor, despite the materials
with which it is built, is it temporary – it is intended to last about 150
years. “It has turned out totally beyond my expectations,” she says.
“Straw-bale houses are warm and the lime walls are breathable. With one
good-sized woodburning stove, I can heat 2½ storeys.” As she grows the wood
she burns, as well as a lot of her own food, Shiamh is indeed touching the
earth lightly.
And no, we wouldn’t expect Persimmon Homes or its rivals to build estates full
of houses like this. It is simply the most extreme example of the eco
tendency in housebuilding, with individual designers and builders leading
the way. If more people like the idea of one-off houses, full of good ideas,
maybe it’s time to look again at the system of building sterile estates with
needlessly wide roads and double garages. Maybe, in the end, we just want a
real choice of better alternatives.
www.channel4.com/4homes
The grandstand
This year’s Grand Designs Home of the Year competition is in five categories:
Best New Build, Best Eco Home, Best Redesign, Best Conversion and Best
Restoration. The three properties shortlisted for each category will be
shown on Grand Designs Live, starting tonight at 8.05pm on Channel 4 and
continuing from Monday to Friday at 9pm. Viewers will have the chance to
vote for their favourite, and an overall winner will be chosen on Friday.
Grand Designs has lost it's way, as has Kevin McCloud. People in the trade are sick of him and if he has his fingers in the 'developing pie' as well then he could get them badly burned. A shame - if they'd stuck with the simple kooky formula it might have stood up well inspite of the property crash
george, aylesbury,