PROPERTY: HOMES FOR THE MILLENNIUM

Why are our cities, towns and villages crowded out with repro Vicwardian, Tudorbethan and olde-worlde cottage-style houses? Couldn't the construction industry approach product development in the same way as car and computer makers - with sleek, fully automated 21st-century modules? According to the builders, they are simply responding to what buyers want - or think they want. We are suckers for tradition and nostalgia, apparently. "People are very nervous about new ideas," said a spokesman for Wimpey Homes. "They want houses that are safe and, ultimately, saleable."

But while the mass housing design market may seem stagnant, there is a growing feeling that it is time for change. Earlier this month, the Royal Insititute of British Architects (Riba) launched the initial research stage of a pounds 50m millennium bid which proposes the development of 2,000 prototype houses for the 21st century. Called "2000 Homes", the project hopes to take the form of a housing Expo which showcases new designs, materials and construction methods and inventive devices for low-energy homes. "Ideally, we would like to be part of the Millennium Exhibition at Greenwich," says architect Bernard Hunt, who is at the helm of the project. "But we envisage five to ten urban and rural sites all over the country."

His own pet project is cultivating Japan's industrial approach to housing - the Japanese are using technology to produce prefabricated, customised houses that can be assembled like Lego in a few days, some of them produced by car manufacturer Toyota. Bernard suggests the time may come when British buyers will be popping down to the local Homes-R-Us and picking up an Ikea-style flat-packed Eco-house to replace a 15-year-old model that no longer fits the bill. In the shorter term, the 2000 Homes project hopes to demonstrate in house-building what has already been achieved by the car, computing and electronics industries - higher performance and improved quality at a lower cost, offered alongside a vast choice of upgrades.

Riba isn't the only organisation to be looking hard at house design. In a May lecture called "Where is the Henry Ford of Housing?", Dr John Miles - director of technology at the engineering consultants, Ove Arup & Partners - is to explore the mileage in taking a motor industry approach to manufacturing homes.

Cars came up again, when the Wates Building Group recently revealed plans to develop a series of radically new houses for "2000 and beyond". The company has asked engineers, architects and, yes, car designers, to come up with ideas for housing schemes which recognise the emerging market for an advanced product that stands out from the crowd. "The current neo- Victorian-Georgian amalgamation doesn't recognise the lifestyle of the future," says managing director Jonathan Spencer. The future is not that far off. Wates is talking about building its first collection of ground- breaking market leaders in the next two years.

Coming up with the design concepts, however, will be only half the battle. Persuading the nervous purchaser of its benefits will also take some doing. "When asked, most people say they want energy-efficient homes, but the majority are not prepared to pay a premium for the extras," says Wimpey. Even when modern building methods can make houses more energy-efficient and cheaper to run than ever before, the building industry claims that buyers remain stubbornly traditional. Under the Standard Assessment Procedure (Sap), introduced in last summer's revised Building Regulations, housebuilders now have to reveal the energy consumption of new homes, measured on a scale of one to 100. But even though a high Sap rating means long-term benefits, it seems buyers have yet to catch on.

A brave vanguard, however, has already embraced the concept of the future home - such as the architect Clare Frankl, who in a recent report produced by the Wates Building Group criticised the industry's propensity for producing standardised "little boxes with no sense of space or openness". "People buy retrogressive, low-performance houses because there's nothing else on offer," she says.

Her imaginary "House of the Future" falls into the executive detached category and is equipped with "smart" walls and windows that automatically respond to changing temperatures; it does not conform to the standard 50/50 ratio of bedroom space to living space, or accept that we have to sleep upstairs. It assumes at least one occupant will work from home, another will be disabled or elderly and the children will come and go.

"The house of the future needs more space, and the space needs to be more flexible," she explains. "In order to make our existing houses work, we kick the car out of the garage and turn it into a workshop, we turn a bedroom into a study and build a conservatory on the back - and we still end up with nowhere to put the miles of cable that go with all our high- tech hardware."

She practices what she preaches. Her own house in south London - a Frankl product, designed by Clare and largely built by her husband, Tim - reflects some of her ideas. The two-storey house includes a large glazed sun room (used as a "messy", semi-outdoor lounge in the summer), a ground floor flat for their son Sam's 90-year-old granny, an upstairs living room, a basement workshop and two integrated but separate office spaces. The upstairs landing, at the heart of the house, is treated as a room, not as dead space.

The front door is curved, Sam's bedroom is circular and the two matching offices are highly glazed and geometric but, overall, the Frankls' brick- clad urban house is not wildly unconventional. Faintly reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's style, it demonstrates that a house of tomorrow doesn't have to conform to outlandishly futuristic aesthetics.

Clare Frankl agrees that one of the functions of the home is "as a refuge and a defence against the chaos of change". But like most of her fellow professionals, she is appalled by the lack of design innovation in mass market housing. "As a result of stagnation, our houses absorb change and go on doing so until they've absorbed so much that something fundamental has to alter," she says. "I believe we are now quite close to one of those watersheds." She is not alone in thinking that it is time designers, builders and buyers started engaging in proactive dialogues to develop new housing concepts. "A new culture of construction is on the horizon."

Architect Bill Dunster's self-built Hope House in East Molesey, Surrey, was actually designed as a prototype for a terrace of low-cost, sustainable urban homes. He envisages rows of these sun-powered, environmentally-friendly houses, in a garden city complex combining teleworking home offices, shops, storage and light industrial space with grow-your-own vegetable plots.

Built of brick, timber, steel and glass and partially clad in stained weather-boarding, the Dunsters' south-facing house has a metal roof and a triple-height conservatory with access on two of three levels. A flexible network of ventilation ducts cast into a concrete slab on the first floor works with a fan to radiate warmth to all areas of the gas-heated house. The conservatory provides an indoor garden-cum-allotment as well as a thermal energy buffer and a solar window. In cold weather, sun-warmed air can be drawn from this conventionally unheated space via a series of internal vents. Used in conjunction with external windows, the same vents air the house in the summer.

"Living here is a bit like sailing a boat and we have had to learn how to sail it through variable weather conditions," says Bill. Despite a complex thermodynamic system designed to minimise energy consumption and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, Hope House scores only 71 on the Sap rating. But Bill claims Saps are based on crude models and are not geared to measure this type of "climatically responsive" architecture.

Also, the house is not technically finished. Had he not run out of money, Bill would have included photovoltaic cells (which harness solar energy) and insulated shutters. The current need to continually open and shut windows could be eliminated by an automated system run off a PC. A rainwater store is in the pipeline. As it stands, the Dunsters' model cost around pounds 75,000 - without taking Bill's labour into account. He maintains it could be reproduced by volume builders to the full specifications (at a Sap rating of 100) at a lower cost.

Some considerably less radical experimentation is also taking place on a larger scale. Last year, Wimpey Homes had a stab at building a group of prototypes. After detailed market research, it built a series of houses in Maidenbower Village in Sussex, and invited some human guinea pigs to take up residence.

Initial findings had revealed that 50 per cent of homeowners would like an extra bathroom and toilet and 13 per cent want a larger kitchen. The idea behind the prototypes, says Wimpey, was to find out if the television aerial was in the right place, the heating radiators were the right shape and whether there were enough power points. Features that were perceived to have failings were modified and absorbed into the design of Wimpey's new portfolio of house styles, the Celebration collection. They offer space-saving baths, family rooms, utility rooms, walk-in closets and "nooks and crannies" for storage, though nothing earth-shatteringly different.

For the future, Wimpey Homes - like other housebuilders - claims to be addressing allergy, disability and teleworking issues and investigating developments in computer-operated heating and security systems, methods for recycling "grey water" (from sinks and baths) and "flexi-living" spaces. Fully automatic homes with light-sensitive blinds which react to light and "intelligent" security systems are on the cards. "At the moment, those sort of features are very expensive," said a Wimpey spokesperson. "But give it another ten years, and they will be widely available" - as common, maybe, as videos, PCs and mobile phones, the once luxury items which we now take for granted.

These might just be the first faltering steps on the road to the flat- pack home or the modern module. But at the least, they should herald a new design era of informed choice for the house buyer of the future.