Are you lucky enough to own a brand new house? Styles vary in modern architecture from the fabulous and well-conceived to eco-friendly to boxy and ugly. So where does yours fall in this spectrum of styles and how should you set about renovating and maintaining it?
By Sacha Markin
Fashions in architecture have fluctuated wildly throughout history, but from the end of the twentieth-century through to the new millennium, we are now seeing a bigger mix of styles and design than ever before. The properties in every town, village and city are an eclectic mix of the old, the new and the ground-breaking. Materials, scales and styles vary to the extreme, and with some builders moving away from the formulaic replicas of period properties, a revolution in British house building has taken place.
It's a revolution driven by innovative new methods of construction, the huge emphasis on the eco-friendly and sustainable, by government planning regulations, and by consumer demand for something more interesting than bog standard. Plus, today we have a range of sophisticated computer software packages, where designs in three-dimension are easy to create on screen, allowing us to see every angle of a possible new home at the click of the house- before it is built.
In fact, in terms of the "eco-friendly" drive (a big moral compass today) a recent survey showed that over 43 per cent of Brits consider environmental features important when they are looking to buy a property- a home that is efficient in terms of the construction method, energy use, CO2 emissions and everyday carbon footprint. We want a high performance yet sustainable home. And while some Britons will always love a period property- Georgian, Victorian, Gothic, Arts & Crafts, 1920s or 1930s, perhaps opting for a classic building but with modern conveniences- in essence, today we want the right balance between function and design.
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