10 RUTH TALKS David Birkbeck profile By Ruth Slavid
THE MAN WHO RUNS DESIGN FOR HOMES IS DEDICATED TO WORKING WITH THE INDUSTRY TO FIND SOLUTIONS THAT IMPROVE HOMES, RATHER THAN ATTACKING THEM FOR THEIR SHORTCOMINGS
S
urely an organisation with a name like Design For Homes should be inclusive? So it sounds odd when David Birkbeck, its first and only chief executive, says that he is interested in the needs of a minority. Is he ignoring much of his constituency? No, the specific minority that Birkbeck is thinking of, somebody in a management role, probably in sales, represents a narrow and quite specific demographic – and that demographic is the tiny proportion of people who are clients for new houses.
There are several reasons why people buy new homes, Birkbeck says, as opposed to the majority of our housing stock which comprises – what? Old homes? Used homes? Second-hand homes? Those words give away one of the reasons for buying new. Some people just want something that is fresh, that is untouched, where nobody has lived before and, more to the point, nobody has died. But the main reason why people buy new homes, says Birkbeck, is ‘because it is easy – they don’t have the time to fiddle around.’ These purchasers, he says, are ‘a certain niche of the most economically active,’ they are ‘people who are building a career, who are moving a lot,’ the management cadre and, specifically, people in sales.
If this sounds incredibly narrow it becomes a little more believable when you remember how small the new build market is. Even when it is, as Birkbeck puts it, ‘at full pelt’, there are only about 200,000 homes built for sale in a year – less than 1 per cent of the total stock of 25 million homes, and only 10 per cent of the two million property transactions that take place in a healthy year.
So in a sense, Design for Homes, dedicated, not surprisingly, to improving the design of new homes, is a minority interest group.
But, over the years, the homes that are new today build up into a large proportion of our housing stock, and so the choices of that individual demographic are important. As, of course, is the social-housing stock that is developed.
PCKO’s eScape project for David Wilson Homes (now Barratt Homes), in Sittingbourne, Kent, was one of the shortlisted projects in the 2008 Housing Design Awards, which Design for Homes administers. The built winner of a research led design competition DFH ran into looking at how to get daylight into 3-storey houses
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