IT’S THE STUFF of which a first-time buyer’s dreams are made. An apartment, in the middle of Manchester’s trendy Northern Quarter, for under £80,000. And it is designed by Wayne and Gerardine Hemingway, proprietors of the iconic 1980s fashion label Red or Dead turned property gurus. There must be a catch.
Well, there are only 90 of them, which start at £79,950 for a studio (from 270 sq ft ), £114,950 for a one-bedroom flat and £132,950 for a two-bedroom flat. The most expensive is about £169,500. And when The Birchin project goes on sale next week (May 26), key workers, usually priced way out of the market, will have first refusal.
“We’re going to release the apartments for sale with staggered selling times, starting at 5am to catch key workers as they come off shift: nurses, firefighters, then teachers, retail workers etc,” says Hemingway. “They will have to prove what they do, but they will be able to choose one before anyone else. We will have to keep some apartments back, obviously, because if 100 firemen turn up all at once it will end up as a firemen’s hostel.”
Investors, he says, are to be held at bay. Quite how he and the property company Dwell Developments, with which the Hemingways are collaborating, plan to do this without the help of guard dogs is unclear.
Blackburn-born Hemingway, who sold Red or Dead for a multimillion-pound sum at the end of the 1990s, is committed to creating stylish, affordable housing. He has collaborated with Wimpey Homes on four developments, and has set his sights on regenerating the mill towns of his native Lancashire.
Today he is in his trademark smart suit and shirt combo, in the fashionable deli Love Will Save the Day, two minutes’ walk from The Birchin. Hemingway, 45, is reminiscing about his punk years. His affection for Manchester, especially the Northern Quarter, with its converted warehouses, eclectic shops and quirky bars, is obvious. So it is fitting that The Birchin, carved out of a 1930s warehouse, is bang opposite Afflecks Palace, the market where Red or Dead opened its first shop in 1982.
The Birchin takes its name from the street it backs on to. With its tattered concert posters and jumble of architecture, it reminds you of the similarities between this part of Manchester and parts of New York. On the corner, though, is a very Northern pub, where old men sip pints through the smoke. And across the road is an unlovely multi-storey car park.
There will be no parking spaces with the apartments. Instead, each will come with a free Brompton folding bicycle, complete with, as Wayne proudly points out, a special hook for behind-the-door storage. Integrating parking into the basement would have sent building costs soaring. Hemingway insists that affordability comes before profitability. But keeping budgets as tight as possible is key to the success of this site, which was acquired for a relatively inexpensive
£2.5 million but is costing £20m in total.
“To be honest, I don’t know how they’re going to make any money out of it at all,” says Elisabeth Williams, head of new homes at Savills in Manchester. “Although values in the Northern Quarter are still some way behind the rest of central Manchester, these are very cheap apartments.”
The area has a wide variety of conversions, so it is difficult to suggest typical prices, but you would be pushed to find anything decent for less than £130,000. Across the whole of the city, including the wildest fringes of Greater Manchester, the average cost of a flat is £134,719.
So why be so altruistic? Hemingway concedes that his company, hemingwaydesign, is “brave”, but maintains: “The guys at Dwell have the same attitude as us. They are a new company and they genuinely want to leave a legacy. Dwell are taking great pride in getting things done cost-effectively. And if they can do this, and do it well, they will get respected by councils all around the North.”
Other savings instigated by Hemingway include retaining the original concrete stairs and installing a no-frills lift. “Lifts cost a fortune. Surely it’s more important to spend money on the inside of your home,” he says. The original idea was to have penthouses on top of the eighth floor. These were ditched, partly because of the extra structural costs, partly because the return on penthouses per square foot would have been uneconomical, and also having an “exclusive” level would have altered the ideology of the building.
“Gerardine and I have shied away from inner-city developments before because just about all of them are unaffordable,” says Hemingway. “They’re about rich business people being able to live in the city centre. None of the things we had been offered fitted in with our philosophy. But this is very different. We can do affordable housing in a place where normally you would pay a fortune to live.”
They can also do it because they have sourced all of the interior fittings themselves, using local suppliers where possible and companies with whom they already have working relationships. The wallpaper is produced by Graham and Brown, the kitchens come from a Blackburn company, and Formica are making the worktops, featuring unique Hemingway patterns in a choice of stripes or a knives and forks motif. “All the apartments in Manchester go for the designer names — but why should we do that . . . we are designers ourselves,” says Hemingway.
Habitat is furnishing the show apartment, each item chosen by Gerardine to reflect the neutral palette she has devised; a Lofa oatmeal textured sofa; an Our Crowd pressed steel lampshade with dancing figures. There are also plans to offer a Habitat furniture package to buyers at a discounted price, possibly even devising a way to include the cost within a mortgage.
So savings all round. But will the keen prices at The Birchin have a knock-on effect across the city centre? Elisabeth Williams thinks not, because the development is tiny compared with huge sites such as Crosby Homes’ Greenquarter, which has 1,500 units. And while there is a steady stream of buyers and investors willing to pay big money for a Manchester pad, few developers are going to slash their deals ridiculously low.
The Birchin apartments are an interesting experiment now. But they will be fascinating in a few years’ time, when they are priced to hit the resale market. Will the Hemingways’ own dream of stylish and affordable housing hold true?
The Birchin, on sale from May 26, Bridgfords Ltd 0161 8391160 www.thebirchin.co.uk
