I love cars, the smell and noise of them, their touch and feel. I much prefer them to houses and if I could, I would like to live in a Maserati Quattroporte. Maybe Maserati could build a special saloon, 20 times the normal size.
That way you could have a house with mirror-finish bodywork in a choice of 20 colours, full leather interior and loads of hands-free technology. You could come home, press your remote control and the house would wake up, flash its lights at you and, welcomingly, slowly, illuminate its interior. And just what kind of home comes with heated sofas with three preset positions for height, rake and lumbar support? Even the lowliest Ford Ka is more carefully designed than the average executive home. This is because car companies invest in design. And their products are better engineered because, unlike houses, they are not made in a field in the rain, but in warm, efficient factories.
A great deal of thought goes into the comfort, safety and practicality of driving a car, whereas the average house layout was deep-frozen somewhere around 1785 and is, in fact, just a crude couple of steps forward from the layout of a medieval hall. Most new housing is about as modern as an ox-cart.
Housebuilders spend about 3p a year on market research, finding out what their customers want. General Motors, meanwhile, invests the annual GDP of a small country on customer research every year.
So where is the intelligent home? Where is the super-efficient house that costs peanuts to run, is designed to meet 21st-century needs and comes with a whole host of choices? Where is the building that is airtight and beautifully engineered, yet doesn’t cost an arm and a leg? Beats me, guv. Of course, there are efficient, well-designed, one-off houses out there. There are exemplary developments, such as BedZED in south London and the Lower Mill Estate in Gloucestershire, where sustainable construction, ecology and design come together in one feel-good eco-cuddle.
But what about everywhere else? Am I supposed to go out and build such homes myself? Well, apparently, yes, I am.
It appears that the only way to introduce a bit of blue-sky thinking into the housing market is for someone who has no experience of development to wade in with some ludicrously unproven and theoretical ideas. Which makes me ideally qualified.
Obviously, the first thing I had to do was think of a snappy name for my new company and get a posh letterhead. So the company is called Hâb, which stands for Happiness, architecture, beauty. It could have been Sustainability, happiness, architecture, beauty, but that would have spelt Shâb. And besides, sustainability is implied in the idea of happiness for everyone.
The next thing was to get a site, an architect and some money (oh, about £8m). Thus far, I have no site (but we are looking at 10, all in the West Country), no architect (but we have asked 50 and are interviewing 20) and no money. Although I should add that Hâb is going to partner the project with BioRegional Quintain, an environmental group that brings unquestionable eco-cred to the party, and which has said that to make a new community work, we will need to build at least 100 homes.
We are going to do a mixture of tenures, from rental to ownership, from one- to three- or four-bed houses. We will have some sheltered and some affordable housing. I want to make it as diverse as possible, and with 100-200 houses, we can do that.
By Christmas, we will have chosen the architects and the site should be pretty well sorted. We will put in for planning permission in summer 2007 and will build in 2008 and on into 2009. We are not going to build in the middle of nowhere — right now, we’re looking at sites along the M4 and M5 corridors in the south. We want something on the outskirts of an existing town or on a brownfield site within one, because we need to plug into a local economy. We are talking about the new suburbia.
But like so many good schemes, this one is founded on contradictions. In fact, architect Ted Cullinan, who is on our shortlist, says he was attracted to Hâb because of one of these contradictions: namely, between trying, on the one hand, to make the design of the housing feel unique and particular to the place in which it is situated, and wanting to build homes off-site, in factory conditions.
Another contradiction will be between giving people a taste of real architecture (the exciting stuff we feature on Grand Designs) and making these homes affordable. Or between creating buildings with real contemporary character and doing so with a design pliable enough to withstand people hanging out their washing, dismantling their car on the drive or even building on a small extension without it damaging the streetscape.
The really crazy contradiction — and the one I enjoy the most — is that, despite the conventional top-down approach we intend to take with the architects and master-planner, we are going to blow the idea apart and make a Channel 4 series about it all. That means following the whole Hâb thing, from design right through to seeing people settle into their new homes. And canvassing public opinion.
Perhaps the greatest challenge — and maybe the biggest contradiction — lies in whether it is possible, while building a new suburb out of brand new housing, to create a community.
“Placemaking” is a newly invented, bastardised discipline, born of the inconvenient truth that places cannot be made. They exist, and can grow organically over time. But you can’t invent the historical narrative of somewhere and just hope it will stick in people’s minds and spring alive. Which is where Poundbury, the Prince of Wales’s Dorset development, does not quite work. It sets up a story, not a history.
This is the crucial area where housing design moves away from the car industry, because houses don’t have wheels. They ought, like good bespoke architecture does, to look as though they belong where they are and have a relationship, not just with the people who live in them, but also with their surroundings. That means designing them sensitively in response to the geography, culture, geology and the here and now of a location.
The design process must give people flexible, shared spaces, such as a community barbecue area or football pitch. Or shared rainwater storage, or a district heating system, or a car pool. All initiatives that help people to meet, work together and reduce their impact on the planet.
Oddly enough, making a home more like a car (highly efficient, super-insulated and ecofriendly) is probably going to be the least of our problems. Creating the circumstances where people want to live in them and stay in them: that will be the real challenge.
