When Prince Charles launched his experimental development at Poundbury in Dorset in the 1990s, Britain’s big housebuilders showed little interest in his quaint notions about old-fashioned architecture and cosy communities: not one of them bothered to tender for the contracts to turn the prince’s ideas into reality.

A decade on, such ideas are no longer wacky but mainstream: these days we are all green, and sustainability has become every builder’s favourite word. Suddenly, the construction industry and the prince are on the same wavelength.

Confirmation of this unlikely alliance will come on Thursday, when the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment — the organisation established by Charles in 1998 to “put people at the centre of the design process” — puts its seal of approval on 11 housing developments chosen from entries by Britain’s biggest housebuilders.

Those selected — and rewarded with a royal plaque — are being recognised for their efforts to produce “better neighbourhoods through more considered design”. In most cases, this means developments that include homes of various shapes and sizes, made the old-fashioned way using local materials. Oh, and they are laid out in a way that means cars aren’t esssential; residents can walk or cycle to local shops and get to work by bus or train.

What made the housebuilders so keen to jump on the royal bandwagon? For a start, Poundbury has become the sort of place that people want to live in — and they are prepared to pay a premium to do so. Houses in this new extension of Dorchester fetch about 5% more than comparable houses in the old town — a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the building trade.

Ruth Guilor lives and works in Poundbury, which will soon have a supermarket and doctor’s surgery. It already has a vet, a dentist and a nursery school. Eighteen months ago, she and her sister bought a four-bedroom townhouse in a Georgian-style crescent for £350,000. Similar houses now sell for £375,000.

“People want to live here because you can live in a traditional house without the bother of an old property,” says Guilor, who is in her forties. “Phase one, about 12 years ago, involved a lot of country-style cottages; now they are building townhouses, reproducing the chimney styles and roof lines of Dorchester. Ours has been commended by the Georgian Society.”

Guilor, who works for CG Fry & Son, the Dorset firm that built her house, has no plans to move. “We will soon have all the facilities we need within walking distance,” she says. “We will have parks and squares and the communications of Dorchester. It suits my way of life and that of lots of others, too. We get young families moving here, and then the grandparents follow.”

Poundbury, it seems, was just the beginning of the prince’s attempts to turn some of the ideas expounded in his book, A Vision of Britain, published in 1989, into bricks and mortar. Representatives of the housebuilding industry were invited to Highgrove and last year the recognition scheme was launched jointly by the Prince’s Foundation and the Home Builders Federation (HBF), whose 300 members build 80% of all homes in England and Wales every year.

Under the scheme, the top 11 builders — responsible for more than half the homes built — were invited to submit three recently completed projects that best fulfil the principles of the foundation: an emphasis on local character, harmony, neighbourliness, “walkability”, income mix, sustainability and communal facilities. One project from each firm was picked, but all marked a move away from the dull developments of the 20th century.

“The idea was to get a benchmark of where we are,” says Hank Dittmar, chief executive of the foundation since 2005 and a former adviser to President Clinton. “This has come out of the concern of the Prince of Wales to engage directly with the housebuilding industry. He tried to do it once before, at Poundbury, when they said, ‘Nice idea, but it won’t work.’ Now times have changed.”

Among the developments selected is one by Crest Nicholson (South West), Port Marine, in Portishead, Somerset. Spread over 190 acres, it includes 900 homes, plus a 450-berth marina, a primary school and health and community facilities. “If you concentrate on the outside as well as the inside, houses sell faster and resale values are higher, in our experience,“ comments Dittmar.

Another of the 11 is at Schooner’s Creek in Colchester, Essex, a development of 122 homes by Redrow Homes (Eastern) that is an extension of an existing village built into its road network. “Nicely proportioned and we liked the notion that houses can read individually, though they are lined up together,” was Dittmar’s verdict.

Others on the list include a development of 60 luxury flats (and 23,000sq ft of office space) by Persimmon Homes (West Scotland) in an old silk-thread factory at Anchor Mill in Paisley, Glasgow, and a complex of 55 sheltered flats for the elderly by McCarthy & Stone, built on wasteland in Cupar, Fife, described by Dittmar as “a reasonable job of trying something brave”.

The once unlikely partnership between the prince and the builders looks set to endure. “In the new sustainable climate-change agenda, a lot of the features we have been looking for in the recognition scheme are just good sense,” says Stewart Baseley, executive chairman of the HBF. “In fairness to the Prince of Wales, he has been banging on about all this for quite some time, but he has demonstrated his ability to be quite a visionary in a number of areas.”

The Prince’s Foundation, 020 7613 8500, www.princes-foundation.org

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