Want a statement modern home? Best have your wallet at the ready. Housebuilders — forced to shelve speculative new schemes by the property market slump — are developing only those with the widest appeal.

Costly architect-designed apartments — such as those for sale through Featherstone Leigh at Bambu in southwest London, which are designed by Quad — are largely out. Family homes with space for a garden, a car and kids are in. A typical development, and one that is very much in, is the eco-conscious village scheme Oaks Hamlet at Kings Hill, West Malling, Kent.

Stephen Briegel, a director at Hamptons International, the agent, says: “The old unsold stock has been dealt with by reducing prices or renting it out. Developers have gone back to basics; you don’t get that architectural wow factor.”

The trend for building tried-and-tested family homes is tipped to continue long beyond this slowdown. Many downsizers will thus need to make use of all their resources for bidding wars to secure the best modern-style homes.

But some design-minded buyers have found a source of attainable designer homes. In Newhall, a neighbourhood of Harlow, Essex, the Moen family is turning a former family farm into a bold new community of 2,800 strikingly modern flats and houses.

Current schemes include “be”, designed by Alison Brooks, the Stirling Prize-winning architect, and “slo”, designed by Proctor and Matthews. Both schemes were winners at this year’s Housing Design Awards. One-bedroom apartments at Brooks’s development are priced from £164,995, and four-bedroom detached homes from £399,995. Two-bedroom homes at slo cost from £220,000.

Professionals with London pay packets were among the first to be won over by Newhall. Familes, many trading up from more conventional estates, such as nearby Church Langley, followed. Now downsizers are being wooed with spacious flats at another scheme, North Chase, where prices start at £195,000 for a one-bedroom home.

www.featherstoneleigh.co.uk
www.oakshamlet.com
www.newhallproject.co.uk

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