I visited the Huf factory once. Trees go in one end, and a mile and a half later, a house pops out the other. Huffies come and put your house up for you in a week, sweep up after themselves, and make you tea, and you get a super-performing surprise house. It’s like buying a house from Willy Wonka.
Or you can go entirely contemporary and modular with Pad. This is fab prefab. You can bolt on (or for that matter I suppose, when you’re old, bolt off) rooms as you need them. Pad, which is based in London, sells a cubic three-bed, 1,076sq ft home for £100,000 (without a site), which, for proper architecture tailored to your land, isn’t bad. And how does its designer, Ashley Beighton, describe it? “It has the build quality of a German car and it’s delivered to site as a sealed, fully tested unit; spotless, perfect and ready to live in.” That’s what I want: a house that looks as though it’s built in the Ruhr Valley.
In case you thought there was still a class-conscious whiff about the prefab, take a look at the Retreat, designed by Buckley Gray Yeoman (£20,000 or so cheaper than a Pad) or the M-House (£135,000): two ultra-groovy, ultra-sustainable abodes that arrive on wheels. You might think of them as mobile homes or as Norman Foster Portakabins, but they look as cool as a pair of frozen cucumbers. And they can sit wherever you’ve got permission for a mobile home, which means a cheaper site to buy — so lower costs. I’ve consequently been looking for a single caravan berth for a year now.
Or why not a home made of recycled shipping containers from Urban Space Management? It is the company behind Container City, which turns shipping containers into homes. It installed Cove Park, a prefab artists’ retreat overlooking Loch Long on Scotland’s west coast, in three days.
But the most innovative build method around is the flatpack method. The giant cornflake-packet system that Ikea will almost certainly use for its mooted new house. No doubt that will have a Scandinavian name (the Dull Høuse?) and come with an 8ft allen key.
The experimental Osborne house, soon to be finished at the Building Research Establishment, uses giant, pre-insulated flatpack panels, as does the £60,000 house unveiled at the Building Centre in London, the winner of a contest launched by the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, in the quest for affordable housing. (It might cost £60,000 to build; it will be more like £200,000 to buy.) The luxurious Lazor Office Flatpak house from the US-based Empyrean, available here through Blackburn Barton, uses a similar system: the Americans invented flatpack in the 17th century. Designed by architect Charlie Lazor, the Flatpak uses laminated pre-made walls made of engineered timber and insulation, is comparatively cheap and quick (a 1,500sq ft model would cost £165,000-£202,500 plus building work and land) and looks like taking over the world.
A couple of other designs from Empyrean — the Deck House and the Acorn — are already springing up over Britain. There are 30-plus Acorns making up a holiday village in Gloucestershire. The Acorn may be a fine home, but is it architecture or a McMansion flown in from Cape Cod? I think the Deck design is the lesser of these two evils, but I can’t wait to see the Lazor Office Flatpak when it is finally built here. In a sense it is better to have no contextuality about the design at all, rather than it be a fake.
Still, I have nobody to blame but myself for the Deck catching on here. Ian and Jennifer McCallum have built a vast one — 2,800sq ft on an acre or so, for almost £600,000 — just outside Mere, in Wiltshire, after seeing one in an earlier series of Grand Designs.
“It is an uncompromising house,” admits Jennifer, 67. “We will need to think carefully about the landscaping.” The local planners didn’t worry, though: “They said it was a unique site capable of supporting a unique house.”
The couple hope to move in in a month’s time. Problems with local builders mean it’s taken a while to finish, but Empyrean met its side of the prefab deal: it was erected and watertight within six weeks of being shipped over from the US.
“Factory production makes things more efficient and gets around the problem of the shortage of skilled labourers,” says Neil Smith, group technical manager of the National House-Building Council.
The medieval Appenzellian probably built crusty log cabins, the predecessors of the modern “square” log systems prefabbed in Poland and Finland. John Cadney, a cabinet maker and woodworker, and his girlfriend, Marnie Moon, finished their four-bed family Erlund home in Kent last year. It’s vast and only cost £130,000 all in, with triple glazing and eco-insulation. The house came as a pile of interlocking lengths of wood. Thousands of them. But to someone like Cadney this was more of an opportunity than a challenge.
“Ever since I was a boy watching carpenters in India, I’ve always made wooden things,” he says. “It’s just growing in scale!” The trouble with these log houses — the trouble with a lot of prefab in general — is that it’s like buying anything from a shop. Get it home and it doesn’t quite look the same. Proper architecture responds to place as much as to people, and so the best prefabs are those that can either be architect-designed into their site and cleverly rewritten, or reclad to suit where they are.
Most of the luxury houses I’ve mentioned can be. But prefabrication is more than likely to deliver all our future housing. Mass housing. If we’re not careful we’re going to create more swathes of Noddy houses while trying to do the opposite. And all because we don’t understand how to imbue buildings with some local distinction and the meaning of place. Our geological range is diverse, and our buildings are historically just as diverse, and it’s a mistake to try and override that. It’s crucial to give a place architecture that looks as though it belongs where it is. That’s a way to give people pride in where they live.
I don’t want to live in a William Woollard blobby house of the future and eat moon food. I certainly don’t ever want to eat a Pop Tart. I want an Eccles cake in Eccles, and a tart in Bakewell.
Blackburn Barton, 020 7350 2345, www.blackburnbarton.com; Border Oak, 01568 708 752, www.borderoak.com; Carpenter Oak, 01803 732 900, www.carpenteroak.com; Container City, 020 7515 7153, www.containercity.com; Empyrean, 001 800 727 3325, www.thedwellhomesbyempyrean.com; Erlund House, 00 358 505 541 103, www.erlund-house.com; First Penthouse, 020 7584 9894, www.firstpenthouse.co.uk; Huf Haus, 0870 200 0035, www.huf-haus.de/en/; M-House, 07779 666 501, www.m-house.org; Padlife, www.padlife.co.uk; Platz Haus, 0845 003 1383, www.platz-haus.co.uk; Retreat Homes, 020 7729 2889, www.retreathomes.co.uk
