Grand Designs Extras Material World

Date Published:

06/11/2008

Prefabricated houses are becoming increasingly bespoke and hi-tech in their materials, but can they replace the flair and craftsmanship of a traditional build, and are they really greener? We weigh up the options

If only Le Corbusier were alive today. With factories finding more clever ways to satisfy our taste for prefabricated homes, his claim that a house is a machine for living in could hardly be more prophetic.

‘It’s almost like buying a car, where you’ve got a chassis and you specify what upholstery, colour and features you want. There’s a large degree of customisation,’ says Joe Martoccia, sales and marketing director of Potton (01767 676 400; potton.co.uk), the largest supplier of timber-framed prefabricated houses in the UK.

It hasn’t always been this way. Prefabs used to sit just above the caravan on the des-res scale, but today’s packages from the likes of Potton, Baufritz, Huf Haus and others are much grander affairs. As Joe points out, many also offer the option to customise to your heart’s content, or bring in designs from an architect.

While there are no standard scales of fees, the RIBA (020 7307 3700; architecture.com) advises that the general level of an architect’s costs for a full design-to-construction completion service is 8-12 per cent of the construction cost, and fees for preparing a design and submitting a planning application are generally 3-5 per cent of construction cost.

‘The value of using an architect can add far more to your project than the costs of the architect’s fees, by benefiting from their creative design flair, technical experience and effective management of your development process,’ explains Richard Brindley, executive director of RIBA professional services

Tim Doherty, managing director of BuildStore’s building support division, thinks bespoke is the way forward for prefab companies. ‘Houses should really be designed around a building plot,’ he says. ‘You should get the size, mass, volume, orientation and overall external aesthetics correct. It’s unlikely you’re going to find a standard design in a book that will be able to go on the average person’s building plot.’

Doherty started in the self-build industry in the mid-Eighties, working for a company importing timber frames from Scandinavia. ‘The Scandinavians wanted to export standard designs with as little variation as possible,’ he says. ‘But the English market was a little more discerning than that. We wanted to use their technology, with designs that had a UK architectural flavour.’

Then in the Nineties, he says, prefabs became more popular. A contributing factor was the recession, which caused a haemorrhaging of building skills, putting off-site factory-based construction increasingly in favour.

‘The landscape has changed in terms of our acceptance in this country, and I think that will now intensify,’ says Doherty, referring to the current woes of the building industry, but also the government’s drive for zero carbon housing with the Code for Sustainable Homes.

So are prefabs environmentally more friendly than traditional building techniques? Doherty thinks so. ‘There is no better way to make a cost-effective, energy-efficient building than doing it in a factory,’ he says. ‘The level of quality control is much greater than on a building site.’

Prefabricated construction can also cut down on waste – although factories still have to be checked to make sure they are using all the offcuts they generate. Detractors point to the transportation of materials as a problem. On the other hand, the skill of workers on a production line is seen as an advantage over on-site builders who may lack experience of working with new methods and technologies.

‘We’re so used to building crappy buildings, which on the face of it look smart, but are incredibly inefficient,’ says Brian Murphy, founder of green product and services website GreenSpec (01733 238 148; greenspec.co.uk). ‘There are green builders in the UK, but it’s not easy to find them.’ He says firms such as The Green Register (0117 377 3490; greenregister.org.uk) and the Association for Environment Conscious Builders (0845 456 9773; aecb.net) are a good place to start.

But perhaps more than their eco credentials, it’s the design, speed of construction and cost that make prefabs so popular. ‘We have economies of scale when it comes to purchasing raw materials and automated production, so we can take a significant amount of cost out of the equation,’ says Joe Martoccia at Potton. The company is now finetuning its product to provide homes that meet level 3 of the Code for Sustainable Homes, and will be introducing contemporary-style houses next year.

‘Innovative products from the likes of BuildStore and more modern styles are attracting a much younger audience,’ he says. ‘We’re looking at a new breed of self-builder.

This article was written by Luke Tebbutt for the December issue of Grand Designs magazine. If you would like to subscribe for as little as £9 then head here to find out more.

For more Grand Designs magazine features click here.

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