Home thoughts: the future of housing as we know it

Britain’s housing crisis is, like Ireland’s, at one level a problem of too many people chasing too few homes in not enough places. But as society changes, with more people living alone or working from home, much of today’s housing is also unsuitable for the way we live now.

One in three people in Britain live on a terrace, a type of housing which became popular when factory workers lived side by side and went to work together at the same time every day. Many others live in flats, although most would prefer not to, and the modern flat block does little to promote a sense of communal living. The cottage is perhaps the dream home of many but it is beyond the reach of most, and is anyway impractical in its traditional form for many contemporary households.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) invited six architectural practices to look at these three types of housing and to design the home of tomorrow based on one of them. The result is an exhibition called At Home in Britain: Designing the House of Tomorrow.

Tatiana von Preussen at vPPR architects looked at everything from the grandest Georgian terraces to small terraced houses designed for factory workers in industrial cities. She saw the challenge as one of recapturing some of the camaraderie of the traditional terrace, while making it suitable for today’s lifestyle.

Shared space

Her big idea was to use the party wall – the wall between two adjoining houses – not as a separation border but as shared space. By widening the party wall, she creates a space that is both an entrance hall and a recreational space for both houses.

“You get on either side of your house, shared space that you have with your neighbour, almost like a garden but it’s covered. You can use that for work, for play, for whatever you decide with your neighbour. And it allows you to work from home but still have the kind of social life of the office. You negotiate only with one person so it isn’t imposed communal living,” she says.

The most common form of communal living is flat-dwelling, although for many in Britain and Ireland it is a poor second-best to a house of one’s own. This attitude is in marked contrast to that in many continental European countries, where city-dwellers embrace the convenience of communal living, preferring to share laundry facilities with neighbours than to own a washing machine, for example.

Dick van Gameren of Dutch architects Mecanoo noted that Britain had a rich tradition of communal living, from Oxbridge colleges to great country houses, although now it is only viewed as ideal for students or the elderly. Mecanoo designed a modern mansion block for about 60 or 70 people, designed to accommodate different generations.

There are studios for students and singles, split-level maisonettes for families and loft spaces for older residents. It combines shared recreational spaces and facilities with what van Gameren views as the essential element of privacy.

“We think there’s a lot of richness in sharing space, certainly if you live in a very dense urban environment,” he says.

“It’s very important to have the right balance between privacy and the idea of sharing. If you are able to strike that balance, this would be a very good model for mixing different housing types into one.”

Jamie Fobert, who also worked on the overall exhibition design, took on the challenge of reimagining the cottage, designing something as airy and light-filled as a modern penthouse, folded into a picturesque, traditional village. Most new housing developments near villages are little more than mini-suburbs plonked on the outskirts, with little connection to the original village.

Typical development

Fobert looked at one typical development in Buckinghamshire and found that 14 per cent of the land was housing, 15 per cent was people’s private gardens and 58.8 per cent was tarmac.

“I built a house in Co Clare and I have seen the decimation of the Irish countryside with suburban bungalows and the sort-of Georgian type. And they’re not terrible, they’re much better than they were in the 1970s, they have a certain density,” he says.

“But they always feel apart. They never feel part of the village. They always feel “over there” and they don’t integrate in a way. So you’re faced with these two things: individuals building houses and getting individual planning or developers developing fields. And we’re trying to find a way for villages to take control of their future.”

Fobert says planners, under pressure to allow more house-building, are usually only presented with one type of development for approval. The standard model of development suits developers, who only have to make one land purchase and predict costs and likely profits easily.

Established community

For many villages, however, a more suitable form of development is to nestle new homes into folds within the established community. Fobert says it is possible to build modern, bright but relatively low-cost houses which fit in with the village rather than sitting apart from it, adding that there is no need to live in “poky brick rooms with tiny windows” just because you live in the country.

He argues that such development benefits everyone, including the village communities themselves.

“Villages themselves don’t want to see change but then they’re sitting in their pretty cottage and if villages are frozen in time and we’re all living to be a lot older, young people in rural communities have no option but to leave because there’s nowhere for them to live in their own villages. Young people who have just married can’t afford a £400,000 cottage because it’s in a site of natural beauty,” he says.

At Home in Britain: Designing the House of Tomorrow is at RIBA in London until August 29