Technical Offsite and M&E

New kid on the housing block

Rational House — a concept that delivers homes in kit form to site — is bringing an integrated design, construction and manufacturing team to the market. Elaine Knutt reports.

IS THIS MODULAR urban housing system likely to be a game-changer for Modern Methods of Construction? The integrated team behind Rational House is cautiously ambitious for their factory-to-site offering, which is about to be given its fi rst full outing in an infi ll development of 10 houses planned for Hammersmith’s Spring Vale estate. With three other sites nearby under negotiation, also for the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham, there’s a confi rmed pipeline of around 50 homes. The design, construction and manufacturing team is cautious, because we all know that offsite housing’s new dawn has been sighted more times than an Indian summer — only for all the optimism to dissolve away to nothing. When brick-skinning a steel or timber frame is a cost-effective way of producing volume housing, why invest in a supply chain and production line doing something different? But it’s also ambitious, because Rational House has the backing of the

Aecom brand — and it might just have launched at the right time. Its target market is local authorities looking to develop their sites for either open market or discounted market sale, a tenure type suited to the so-called “squeezed middle”, where the council retains a variable slice of the equity. But the decisive factor is that local authorities can now draw on funds in their Housing Revenue Accounts, an opportunity likely to appeal to London and other authorities in the south east aware of the need to increase housing supply. Rational House’s modular fl exibility, speed of erection, and low impact on surrounding residents means it can exploit small infi ll sites overlooked by mainstream developers, offering cost certainty and a sliding scale of additional cost benefi ts related to the volume ordered. Ben de Waal, head of residential at

Aecom, explains: “We’re trying to deliver better living space for people, and

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Rational House challenges the conventions on housing design and delivery methods