THE ARTS: ARCHITECTURE: PEOPLE IN GLASSHOUSES...;
THE ARCHITECT GRAHAM PHILLIPS HAS DESIGNED AND BUILT A FLAT-TOPPED GLASS MENAGERIE AS HIS DREAM HOME. WILL IT POINT TO A BOLDER FUTURE FOR SELF-BUILD HOUSING, DESPITE LAND AND MONEY RESTRICTIONS? BY NONIE NIESEWAND

Reprinted from The Independent (London)

Monday, March 13, 2000,

A long low glass box of a suburban family house touching down lightly in front of a great sheet of water looks expensively out of reach. At pounds 480,000 for a four-bedroom 2,500 metre square family home, it is. But the cost would be double if architect Graham Phillips had not built his dream house himself.

Designed just like a kit house but on a customised steel frame instead of a timber A-frame to give it its mathematically flat roof, it was raised in just 72 hours one weekend like the Amish barns of Pennsylvania; and all built with what self-builders call direct labour and materials - that is, cutting out the contractor.

Bereft of a forest of columns, thin glass spans across the lakeside facade and all along the back where the bedrooms face a private courtyard; a transparent home stretched between two long thin masonry side walls that slide out beyond the glass like screens. It is never clear where nature ends and the house begins. It appears to float.

All through Phillips's years in Hong Kong as a senior partner at Foster and Partners, he was dreaming of building his own house outside London. Early self -build exhibitions at Crystal Palace put him off the "repro" period pieces cloned without craftsmanship in modern materials, but convinced him that he would have to design his own "truly modern house" using the same modular techniques as kit builders.

So he began with a perspex cube, shaving and refining it until he had the long low glass box that would enable certain customised parts to be ordered and built by daily rate workers under the supervision of a site construction manager.

Now his three children, the iguana and the Alsatian live in the flat topped glass menagerie that he and his wife Diane call Skywood House. Within, no light switches intrude - there is a hidden bank of them - and there are no radiators because limestone slabs hide underfloor heating. He has furnished it with classics from Le Corbusier and his own architectonic furniture, simple stone or wooden blocks that follow the grid plan of the floor, some flat blocks raised high as beds, others low as coffee tables.

Finding the site was the hardest part. Estate agents' blurbs proved economical on the truth. That bungalow on a plot "fit for redevelopment" proved to be sandwiched between two narrow houses on a small strip of land with the main plot being a field at the back without planning permission. It took 18 months to find four and half acres of land at Denham in Middlesex in a green-belt area which prevented building the double height rooms with a mezzanine floor that he wanted.

Landscaping the site involved such Sisyphean tolls as making water flow uphill to fill the lake that distances the transparent house from passers- by. More about privacy than being precious, he dug that lake with a JCB and lined it with bin liners before filling it with water. Every birch and bush was moved to make the route to the house circuitous and ensure an undisturbed life.

This is a house of great beauty, that doubles as a brilliant example of what self-build houses could be like, rather than the boring chalets under pitched roofs of the Little Chef school of architecture that housing kits still offer.

Houses of the future could well be built by their owners and Britain is a nation of DIY enthusiasts. We spent pounds 8bn last year on house renovation materials from home centres. At the last roof-count of new houses in 1999, 35,000 were self-build, mostly in Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Devon and in Scotland where there are plots of vacant land. At pounds 55 to pounds 70 per square foot, self-build houses save from 20 to 30 per cent on current house prices.

At the biggest ever national self-build event, the National Home Building and Renovating Show, which closed yesterday at the NEC in Birmingham, 116,000 enthusiasts came to learn about building the house of their dreams themselves. On offer was advice on how to overcome the two biggest obstacles to building your own, home apart from bruised thumbs and egos - namely, the land and the money.

In the past, banks and building societies refused to lend on land for self -build and even specialist self-build mortgages tended not to release funds until building works had been approved by a certified surveyor. The new "Accelerator" mortgage has a borrowing capacity of 95 per cent of the cost of the land and the estimated value of the completed home, but unlike other self-build mortgages, it provides the money in advance.

Meanwhile, there are many lessons to be learned from the Land Registry's database which collates information on more than 17 million houses and which is growing by 1,000 homes a day. For the last decade all transactions on land have been registered with this Government organisation and for a pounds 4 search fee, the Land Registry will issue you with a printout of the very details that could prevent expensive mistakes as building regulations on available land tighten up.

Even so, land is likely to remain a key obstacle to all self-builders. Speaking at the Heating and Ventilation Summit 2000 last Friday, Conservative MP John Gummer called for more opportunities for self-build on "already used land but no special exceptions for self-build on greenfield sites". Concreting over the countryside simply isn't an alternative any more, which means kit-form self -builders must change their ways just as the property developers of housing estates are being urged to do.

Present kits rely upon timber A-frames in a number of styles cloned from the past five centuries picked from a catalogue and delivered by lorry. Flick through kit-form catalogues and you enter Joanna Trollope country.

Potton's "Heritage" collection offers "Shire" pseudo-Tudorbethan chalets, a "Rectory" range in a secular age, and what the PR describes as "big airy rooms with tall chimneys" is a travesty of Queen Anne. Shells that go up quickly to become a clone of Hunca Munca's house are about as appealing to the more adventurous house builder as Airfix model makers stuck with Wright's flying machine and no Concorde.

But even the bold need a bit of hand-holding which is why the Association of Self-Build Architects was launched at the National Home Building and Renovating Show. It boasts 65 architects nationwide who charge 7 to 10 per cent of the total cost in fees to make your plans fit the site. Architect Julian Owen, director of the new association, calls the service "bespoke building".

We have come a long way since those hippies in the 1970s who went hammer and nails after hand-built houses, knocking them up in the Catskill mountains outside New York and in the highlands and islands of Scotland where colourful rustic cabins sprouted chimney pots above crazily-pitched roofs. No more. That geeky look has been overruled by planners in local boroughs. The aim is to get a sophisticated one -off, which is why so many architects have joined the race to individualise mass market modular housing.

If it catches on, one of these projects, HangerHouse, which will be launched at the Ideal Home Exhibition at Earls Court in London this Wednesday, will let homeowners tailor their own living space using giant wire coathangers. The HangerHouse, by architects Katy Ghahremani and Michael Kohn, is so far no more than a good idea - it needs a developer to invest big-time in the concept - but it would allow space buyers to insert their own requirements into the steel frame envelope. You either buy a house or apartment on several levels or lease the space. Double up or have a baby, and you could add another section. Get divorced and you could pull one out. Cellular rooms, moulded as bathrooms or bedrooms, play or work rooms, kitchens and living spaces, simply hang upon the frame.

Yet, given the possibilities of expanding individual choices in our housing, it is chastening that Graham Phillips's house was the only submission for last year's Royal Institute of British Architect gold medal award in the housing category. It didn't win because a jaundiced judge, who hadn't visited the site, thought it was "kitsch". Norman Foster, who has visited, calls it "spiritual". Phillips has been advised to enter his house again for a housing award in 2000. He deserves to win.

GRAPHIC: Self-builder's dream: the glazed lakeside facade of Graham; Phillips's 'floating' transparent family home, Skywood House Nigel Young