Extras Kevin McCloud: Gated Developments

Date Published:

19/06/2008

Gated developments are turning the suburban dream into an ugly nightmare, says Grand Designs presenter and architecture aficionado Kevin McCloud.

Not all of us can live in gated developments in Knutsford, Virginia Water, Sandbanks or St George's Hill. These are the most exclusive, most bizarre communities in Britain, where the fabulously wealthy buy £20million homes on two acres of preened land with perimeter fences and infrared dogs. Despite the cachet of these addresses, having visited them I'm not sure I want to live in a patrolled compound redolent of something you'd find in South Africa or Nigeria.

There's a whiff of colonialism there, and of the risque, too. These polite suburbs, with their Mercedes SLs and Porsche Cayennes parked outside, are, I think, the natural home of the swinging couples scene and untrammelled cocaine consumption. Every house has a swimming pool and every pool has a bored yummy mummy by it - a Mrs Robinson (in my dreams at least).

But now, it seems, this world of plastic grass and pool boys is under threat from the very people who own it. These developments were built throughout the twentieth century and, although they do contain some of the most weird, gross and profligate buildings in Britain, it seems that many of them just aren't big enough for the new-money owners who want to show off just how weird, gross and profligate they can be. Their solution is to demolish a perfectly good - if ugly- five-bedroom house with brown bricks and matching windows and then replace it with a behemoth twice the size, straight out of a Florida house-builder's catalogue. The new buildings aren't ugly - they're spectacularly ugly. They might have a French sixteenth century chateau tower shoved on to an arts-and-crafts front, or a glass box protruding from a fake-Georgian fibreglass pediment. They're Frankenhouses. They dwarf their plots. They're elaborate and take years to build. The leafy paradises of the nouveaux riche that once enjoyed a modicum of good taste have been turned into noisy building sites on which the insanely wealthy are experimenting right up to the boundaries of their plots and the limits of the ludicrous. This is no longer a setting for Footballers' Wives but the Hammer House of Horror.

It's a shame when so much human energy, craftsmanship, resources and money are spent in pursuit of the mediocre. The mediocre can do very well, thank you, on much more modest means; the mediocre doesn't tend to engender high expectations. But beyond the architectural disappointment of these new developments, there's an even more disturbing fact. Not merely content with landing their pick'n'mix homes in such an exclusive address, the potential owners want more: they want bigger, better, and then even bigger and better than that. They're not only looking for seven bedrooms, but they also want each to have its own dressing room and en-suite bathroom. They're looking for bedrooms the size of tennis courts. They want a master suite with a range of ancillary rooms for washing and dressing in, plus a gym and even a private upstairs living room. In effect, what they want is a miniature condominium block with separate apartments for themselves and their children, a kitchen area for a maid to prepare separate meals for them all, and a set of reception rooms where they can throw drinks parties. These are people who have spent far, far too much time in luxury hotels.

This is a great mistake, because the last thing that a hotel resembles is real life. You may find a pampering spa and room service all very beguiling, but I'll tell you what you won't find in room 521: community, neighbours, friendship and family. And you won't find these qualities on those strange 'securitised' estates either. Just as they are the epitome of showing off, and just as they answer the need for 'ultimate privacy', they are also a social dead end: community cul-de-sacs. I'd avoid anything that is gated if I were you.

Would you like to live in a gated compound? Perhaps you already do. Don't sit on the fence: email us with your views at info@granddesignsmagazine.com

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