Same difference

Speculative housebuilders are often derided for their espousal of standard housetypes. Standard types have become discredited because they are often poorly designed, offer very little choice or differentiation, and do not respond to consumer preference. Housebuilders use them because standardisation offers predictability in cost, construction process and quality – all highly desirable attributes. Yet, with a modest degree of innovation, standardisation could deliver so much more.

Everyone is asking how the housebuilding industry is going to hugely increase output at the same time as achieve unprecedented standards of environmental sustainability, new heights of design quality and with continuously improved levels of customer satisfaction. Pattern book housing could be the answer, whereby appropriate standardisation becomes a perfectly legitimate concept for developing and refining successful living environments.

There is plenty of historical precedent for this. Places we like most to visit on holiday (such as the Mediterranean hill town) and which are lastingly popular (such as Georgian London) exhibit a responsiveness to user requirements enabled by appropriate building typologies and technologies that have met changing needs.

In historically successful places, dwellings have usually been refined to become familiar archetypes of built form – adapted to lifestyle and climate. Homes support the lives of individual families. Put together, groups of homes form an effective backdrop for society and collective activity, creating a pattern that reflects the quality of life we want to lead.

These precedents tell us that our quest should be the continuous refinement of generically successful typologies in the interests of improving performance that meets the changing needs and aspirations of occupants over time.

Of course, to be true to our age we must not ape the past, we must adopt contemporary industrial strategies. And today, in many other industries, mass customisation offers the opportunity for almost unlimited variety, reflecting human diversity and taste.

Mass customisation is the industrial process in which a carefully chosen and limited range of standard components can be mixed and matched to provide a wide model range without losing the benefits of economies of scale. The Ford Focus is a prime example. But if mass customisation has served other industries so well, why do we see no evidence of it in housebuilding?

It is not for want of trying. The Eames House, a wonderful home that Charles Eames and his wife, Ray, created half a century ago in Pacific Palisades, USA, is made entirely of components from a cladding manufacturer’s catalogue, and capable, in theory at least, of mass production. This iconic precedent remained a one-off, despite being much revered among designers.

Since then there have been many experiments which students of housing have followed with enthusiastic interest in which the dream of mass customisation has been explored. The impact on production of mass housing remains minimal. The reasons given for this are various: inadequate investment, too much fragmentation in the industry, lack of supply chain integration, inherent conservatism among the mass housebuilders and so on.

Quite possibly the most fundamental obstacle is conservatism in the marketplace. Punters want to play safe with something they know they can sell on. But here at last things may be changing. According to a recent report in The Times, quoting a Halifax Building Society survey, there has been a significant shift in market aspirations. Customers seem at last to be abandoning nostalgia in their purchasing preferences. Only 13% of those questioned dreamed of living in a former barn, castle, mill or vicarage, or any other historic precedent that justify the depressing Tudorbethan standard housebuiders’ product.

Instead, there is a growing demand for convenience, eco-consciousness and, significantly, homes built to purchaser’s specifications. Like many new market trends, the demand for customisation has taken root first among the wealthy. How quickly this percolates down the market remains to be seen, and will depend not only on the buoyancy of the economy, but also the ability of the mass sector of the industry to meet the demand. We must move to organise ourselves in anticipation.

So, three imperatives are emerging in the marketplace for new homes:

• Convenience and ease of use
• Environmental consciousness
• Customisation

This is potentially great news for designers involved in housing because the consumer is demanding what amounts to a revolution in house design. Architects should be in among the industrial processes of housebuilding, as designers are in other industries, constantly refining the standard product to improve its sustainability, convenience and choice.

One approach, suitable for lower density housing in the region of 30-50 homes per hectare, is based on the repeated use of a generic barn-like structure on two or three floors, usually with a double height space for the living area. This creates the archetypal image of “home” with its pitched roof and gables and can be used in a wide variety of settings. These barns may stand alone in their most basic manifestation, but the addition of a variety of linking structures provides a large variety of permutations and combinations of additional space, and enables the basic type to be adapted for different layout requirements.

The scheme illustrated below is at Upton Northampton, for David Wilson Homes. It was the winning submission in a developer competition run by English Partnerships which has done a great deal, setting high standards for the housebuilding industry to aspire to.

English Partnerships was also behind the second example illustrated left, at Campbell Park, Milton Keynes. Here, town houses at a density of 120 homes per hectare are designed on the model of the traditional terraced house adapted in a variety of ways. Car parking is accommodated in a podium structure at the rear onto which the house engages with a stepped section. At roof level there is a terrace, screened with a pergola that supports an array of renewable energy collectors.

In this scheme, we have set out to express the variety of human occupation in the creation of an external framework that serves multiple functions, supporting balconies and winter gardens, screens and shading devices which are in turn decorated as part of our public art strategy, acting as an armature for climbers to grow up, and the means to collect and distribute rainwater.