Town House is a new concept for mass housing that is a direct challenge to the established typologies of the major UK housebuilders. It exploits clever modular planning to create spacious, flexible, modern and sustainable customer-designed homes.
We have taken the familiar pitched-roof form and turned it longitudinally to create a long ‘loft-style’ spacious home that is aimed at the urban house-buying market. Purchasers have a choice of two or three storey houses and the option of ‘loft’ or garden-focused living spaces with open plan or more traditional layouts. The raw shell of the house contains simply a stair, a kitchen and bathroom pod. A series of layouts can then be selected which tailor one to six bedroom homes. Space standards are generous, windows large and insulation levels and air tightness are to a very high standard.
Customer choice is the driving concept behind Town House. The challenge was to develop a design that could offer purchasers a choice of sizes, of living spaces and of layouts – as well as different kitchen, bathroom and finishes options – allowing customers to tailor their new home to their individual tastes from over 130,000 possible combinations. This is achieved through a rigorous organisation of the plan with fixed zones for circulation and services and a defining logic governing possible locations of internal walls generating a series of standard room sizes. These fixed parameters allow a wide range of layout options within a standardised shell. Purchasers can select from a variety of layouts and finishes, or can choose to fit out the shell themselves.
Not only that, Town House is also factory-built to order, before being delivered to site fully finished. Four years of research and prototyping have gone into developing the Town House product, now in full production. Town House though, is not a static idea; a process of on-going research and development allows it to evolve with improvements to performance, fabrication, external appearance and the range of customer options. Building on the success of Town House, a suite of other new housing products is being developed.
To date we have completed Town Houses at:
New Islington, Manchester
Smith’s Dock, Tyneside
Irwell Riverside, Salford
with many more sites in the pipeline.