Home One
There's a housing crisis in Britain. Not enough homes are being built. In particular, not enough affordable homes are being built. Confusing word, 'affordable': it depends who you are and how much money you have. I prefer the less ambiguous 'low-cost' or just plain 'cheap'. If you're wealthy there is no housing crisis - there are plenty of homes you can buy - and wealthy people do buy them. Chinese billionaires buy luxury apartments as investments and to offshore their wealth; Premiership footballers buy mansions with stables, pools and gyms; the middle-classes have their holiday homes on the coast. All these are un/under-occupied and do nothing to lessen the housing crisis. At the bottom end of the market, where young people have to look for their first home, there's less choice. For your first home - home one - you cannot be choosy about location, space, facilities, state of repair, design quality,... You will have limited choice in the range of rent you can afford. I say rent because the chances of buying your first home are vanishingly small. If you're affluent you can be picky about your house - nice design, the spaces you need, good location, energy efficient, and so on - but if you're trying to find your first home you have to take what's available.
Trying to get on to the housing ladder, young people inevitably have to pay the lion's share of their income to the landlord while struggling to save anything towards a deposit to buy. When they step to the next rung they have no stake in their old, rented, home - just whatever they have managed to save as a deposit. But if they can get a mortgage at least they can call themselves home owners and have a stake in their home, even if the bank effectively owns 95% and it will be many years before their monthly payments go beyond paying the interest and start increasing their equity. Once they are home owners they can watch the value of their home grow with house-price inflation as the mortgage payments slowly become a smaller part of their rising income. They are on their way!
Buying a car is different. It used to be like buying a house. First you couldn't afford one and occasionally hired a car when you needed one. Then you saved enough to buy something old, cheap and unreliable. You might have borrowed some money to help, but now it seems almost everyone buys/rents using contract purchase. As big a deposit as you can afford and monthly payments over three or four years, and then you own a good share of the car and can pay the balance and keep it or hand it back having spent much less than buying outright. It seems to me that this model could work well for first homes. Buyers rarely stay in their first home for many years so a thirty-year mortgage means they will basically be paying interest - not so different from rent. If the property was cheap enough a four-year contract purchase might make more sense: ending with a significant stake in the value and the option of being able to hand it back. While cars lose value as soon as they leave the showroom, property increases in value over the years, so its value at the end of the contract term would be more and the monthly payments less. The householder could pay off the balance of the purchase price and become a property-owning capitalist overnight.
Industrialised housing has been an interest of mine throughout my career - was the subject of my thesis at university - but it has never been widely applied beyond some attempts at system-built social housing. There are good reasons for this: buildings need to respond to the circumstances of their site; people like individuality - not ticky-tacky boxes; houses are not products like cars or washing machines. But for home one, maybe a product could be the answer. People should not have to put up with badly-maintained, energy-costly, cramped or space-wasting properties for their first homes, but if they're only going to live there for a few years, how important is individuality? What if they could have a new, well-designed, energy-efficient home? Factory production of standardised products could be the answer, allowing quality and good design at a realistic price. I say 'standardised' but if you order a new car you will often be presented with an enormous choice of options for colour, trim, upholstery, climate control, media systems, automatic controls, and more, though the body shape and disposition of drive-train, wheels, seating and windows will be standard. Your new starter home might be the same size and layout as the one next door but with your choice of bathroom and kitchen fittings, floor finishes and lighting, there would still be consumer choice.
HomeOne is my suggestion for such an approach. It has a very simple form factor: a cuboid 3.5m wide and high and 10.5m long with doors and windows at each end. Like an outsize shipping container it would be economical to manufacture and to transport to site, and the featureless sides and flat roof allow for terracing and stacking in various space-efficient configurations. Manufacturer at scale would allow for better quality at lower cost than equivalent homes built on site and 'home-as-product' suits the needs of first-time buyers and innovative financial approaches like contract purchase.
The plan places the most-used spaces at the ends, against the doors and windows within an interior volume 3 x 3 x 10m or 30 sq.m. The living space would typically be at the south or west-oriented end with the kitchen/dining area at the north/east end. The bedroom is behind the living space, separated by a shelving/bedhead room divider, and the 'wet' bathroom, with its basin, WC, 'rain' shower and heated towel rail shares a 'service' wall with the kitchen. A cupboard next to the bathroom houses a washing machine with a hot-water storage tank above. Ceiling heights are a generous 3m to give a feeling of space and good daylighting but lower over the bathroom and circulation space to accommodate services. The accommodation is comfortable for one person and usable by a couple.
Construction: As far as possible building-industry-standard materials and components are used, prioritising low embodied energy and sustainability. Using pre-existing and industry-standard stuff keeps down initial research and design costs and facilitates on-site adaptations. Side walls, floor and roof are all SIP (structural insulated panel) construction: foam insulation sandwiched between OSB board; lined internally with extra insulation and a vapour barrier allowing wiring routes and finishes to choice; externally, a seamless rubber roof finish and wall finishes to suit the configuration, local traditions and personal choice. Doors and windows would be triple glazed to minimise heat loss with effective draught seals and maintenance-free finishes - products such as Velfac would be excellent. Triple glazing, along with the limited area of glazing and the highly insulated walls, roof and floor minimises fabric heat losses. The rigid structure allows for flexible approaches to foundations and fast, low-impact solutions such as auger-piles would minimise site work and environmental impact.
Services comprise the usual electrical power circuits, hot and cold water and drainage pipework, plus energy-efficient climate control by mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) incorporating a reversible air-source heat pump (ASHP). Sited above the 2m ceiling quiet fans extract moist, smelly air from the bathroom and kitchen and expel it to the outside, at the same time drawing in fresh, clean outside air to replace it. Both air streams pass through a heat exchanger and the coils of the heat pump. In winter, when the outside air is cold, heat is transferred from the used extract air to the fresh air supply, by the heat exchanger, and the heat pump will, if needed, further cool the exhaust air and further warm incoming air. On hot summer days, this is reversed, with the heat exchanger and reversed heat pump cooling the incoming air and dumping the heat into the extract air. The heat pump will also keep the hot-water tank and the heated towel rail up to temperature. Water and drainage are in the service wall between the kitchen and bathroom. Drainage connects from one stacked unit to the one below then into the underground drains. Electricity and fibre feed into the bedroom cupboard where the consumer unit and (optional) solar battery are sited.
Finishes: plasterboard wall and ceiling finishes as standard internally, with options such as birch ply as options and waterproof finishes such as acrylic in the wet room and to splashbacks. Where units are terraced or stacked and side walls are not exposed, the rubber roof finish could extend to the walls. Elsewhere, larch rainscreen cladding as standard with options - site applied if appropriate - to suit the situation. Tile hanging, shingles and brick or stone cladding are possibilities.
Configurations obviously include the single, detached unit and the sizing of the climate control together with the low fabric and ventilation heat losses would allow for this, but the design has combinations of units in mind. Simple single-storey rows would be easily achieved, possibly stepping horizontally or down sloping ground. Access would be at the (north or east) kitchen end, with bins, bike storage and parking, while the living areas would open onto private decks and shared gardens. With units placed side-by-side there would be little heat loss through side walls, increasing energy efficiency. Even more efficient, in terms both of energy and land usage, is stacking. The construction would be strong enough to stack up to three storeys with walk-up access via wood or steel-framed stairs and access decks. Units intended for stacking would be supplied with balconies instead of decking. Roofs could have photovoltaic solar panels linked to solar batteries above ceilings, saving on energy costs for the climate control and charging electric vehicles.
Cost: Regardless of the finance model - mortgage or contract purchase - the principal barrier to home ownership is cost. Many more new 'affordable' homes are needed for first-time buyers, which means building more. Few homes are built below 50 sq.m floor area and a reasonable cost is perhaps £200/sq.m or £100,000. HomeOne is 30 sq.m and organised factory production lines, unaffected by weather, repeating a standard basic product would give substantial economies. The cost of a home would be at least halved, bringing it into the same price range as a quality car and the budget of thousands more first-time buyers.
So there we have it: small, cheap homes assembled on production lines using readily-available standard building components usable in many configurations and locations and supported by innovative financing to help first-time buyers on to the home-owning ladder and solve the basic housing crisis. You're welcome.
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