Kit Houses Kit Homes: The Cutting Edge

Date Published:

10/07/2008

Based on medieval German designs, the Huf Haus (recently featured on Grand Designs) offers a kit home with a very recognisable external profile, but inside a space limited purely by the confines of your own imagination. Again, the company's architects work with you to create the home of your dreams, the property is then constructed off-site with just the basement being rapidly put together by Huf's own technicians on site. The build is roughly ten days.

But while wood clearly dominates the self build and kit home consciousness over here at present, interesting things are beginning to happen in the fields of steel off-site manufacture in Australia and America.

Steel is gaining in favour as more than just a useful material for building frameworks for what advocates claim are largely very obvious reasons:
* It possesses the highest strength to weight ratio of any building material currently being used.
* It is non-combustible.
* It is non-organic and thus not prone to rot or elemental distortion.
* There is a factory-governed consistency of quality.
* Advocates claim that there is less waste in construction.
* Once made the material retains its shape, meaning no sudden sticky door or window frames.
* Steel is surprisingly lightweight making it easier to handle.

M&S

As good old Marks & Spencer's formerly reliable fashion sense has seemed to falter, its eye for a good interior has never been better. This expanding interest in all things 'home' reaches its natural zenith in the 'Lifestore' in Gateshead.

Lifestore

Intended to 'revolutionise the home retail market' Lifestore will feature more than 12,000 products from cutlery to garden benches. Clearly picking up on some of the success of Ikea's themed interiors sets, the 70,000sq ft megastore close to Gateshead's MetroCentre will showcase themed 'worlds' dedicated to relaxation, play and the outdoors.

Centrepiece of the store will be a complete two-storey house designed by award-winning architect John Pawson.

The plans of the house are even available to buy at a cost of £1,000 with building costs estimated at over £300,000. With the cost of the land on top this could be a very stylish, but not altogether affordable for fans of modernist architecture.

Back to top