Episode Information Trade Secrets Bath

Date Published:

17/06/2008

Innovations in engineering and manufacturing have transformed what was once cheap and flimsy into cutting edge cool. Choose well and it can take some of the stress out of building your own home. But with over 400 companies in Britain to choose from, how do you pick the perfect prefab?

One of the best-known kit homes has to be the Huf Haus, which arrived on our shores from Germany ten years ago. There are now over 100 of them in the UK. The Huf Haus has reinvented what a prefab is - instead of being something quite cheap and not very dependable, here's a product that speaks of quality and German dependability. They're very well made and surprisingly stylish.

Luckily for us, UK architects are now embracing prefab with a passion. More and more architects can see just how much sense it makes. To move away from slow, dangerous forms of construction on a windy, wet, muddy building site into a totally controlled factory environment can only be a good thing. It will enable architects to get closer to that holy grail of defect-free construction.

There is a clear upside to manufacturing your home in a factory. But the downside is that very often you have to make every decision about every detail before it's built, and the usual opportunities for changing your mind don't exist on a prefab project. But if you are not the decisive type then don't worry because the bespoke flatpack may be just the right thing for you.

As always, part of the problem with building your own home is finding a plot, but here too, kit houses have quite an edge. Kit home design is reaching dizzying new heights where not even our rooftops are out of bounds. Now you can crane a prefab penthouse right into place.

These penthouses are built entirely off site in a matter of months in 3D modules. Everything comes included, even the kitchen sink. It's installed in just one day, but because you have to decide on absolutely every detail in advance the design stage can take a very long time. It might take six months to design but then the construction phase on site might last only a day.

Finally, from the high and mighty to the positively tiny. Measuring just 2.6 metres squared, the Micro Compact Home is one of the smallest prefabs in the world. Designed as a crash pad or holiday base, it's an ecological concept based on the principle of less material and energy being used in the building process. This is a very important aspect for the future.

The Micro Compact Home is a very low energy, low carbon footprint product. It comes with an equally low price tag, just £30,000. You'll still need to purchase a plot, but once you have you just need four small foundation piles, a waste pipe and water supply. And you won't even need to buy furniture.

The future of prefabs is really interesting. Right now the hottest designs are being built in Germany. But just imagine, we might soon be making them in China where production on a huge scale is quite possible. Then we've got a real challenge; do we want housing to be mass-produced on a global scale? Will we forget about an area's vernacular? It's important that designers take this process of prefabrication and make it bespoke, make it particular and really make it flexible for the future so that it can be adapted to be sympathetic to any given setting.