“Under the present [planning density] rules we can get about 55 per cent housing and about 45 per cent apartments [into a new-homes scheme],” says Stephen Garvey, chief executive of Glenveagh Homes. The homebuilder is proposing reforms to these rules in an attempt to ensure all homes within future developments will have their own front door, as part of its Love Where You Live campaign.
Guidelines state developers of greenfield sites in cities and large towns must construct 35-50 dwellings per hectare of land. Glenveagh has proposed an approach wherein 40 dwellings per hectare of land can be maintained by amending current planning regulations to allow each unit to have its own front door, forgoing the need for the development of apartment blocks.
Apartments and duplexes have proven to be less desirable outside of cities, Garvey says, and they cost more to build, thus having a knock-on effect on the price of every home within the wider development.
“If we can change the present rules and bring more own-door housing, it naturally reduces the costs, and our own study showed that we could reduce the cost by 20 per cent,” says Garvey.
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Teaming up with architect Dermot Bannon from RTÉ's Room to Improve, the measures Glenveagh has proposed to achieve developments of all own-door homes include providing smaller open spaces throughout a development as opposed to one large, central green; reducing the average size of homeowners’ gardens to focus more on public spaces; and reducing the separation distance at the back of homes for opposing first-floor windows of neighbouring houses from 22m (72ft) to 16m (52ft 6 inches).
Looking overseas for inspiration, they have taken a “Scandinavian approach”, says Bannon, where people move homes to suit the various stages of their lives. “We need to design schemes that instead of people extending, they can sell up and move to something bigger, and when kids move out, they move to something smaller,” he says. “We looked at the whole life cycle from starting as a single person to being an older single person,” says Garvey, “[that way] you cater for everyone. That’s how good housing policy should work.”
“If you can cater for everyone to stay in one community all their lives and create those roots, they will know all their neighbours. You just have to create the product for them,” says Garvey, while citing the examples of own-door one- and two-bedroom bungalows for downsizers.
The idea of planning for people of all ages also underscores Bannon’s explanation of moving away from the large central greens that will be familiar to generations of homeowners, and more particularly to their children, to smaller “pocket parks” interspersed throughout a development.
“Traditionally, you have to give a certain amount of space over as public open space and that’s generally lumped into one area and then that’s it. What happens is if you live five streets back, you have no public space,” Bannon says. A large football-pitch-sized green area “suits kind of six-, seven-, up to about 11-year-olds who play football and all that on it, but it’s not inclusive,” he says, pointing out the multifunctionality of squares in places such as Paris and Barcelona.
“If you go to those places, you don’t have the 65-year-olds in one part of a space and the 11-year-olds in another,” says Garvey, the community mixes together, creating a more inclusive atmosphere.
The space for multiple public open spaces must come from somewhere, and so Glenveagh’s approach seeks to lessen the size of back gardens and to the reduce separation space from neighbouring homes from 22m (72ft) – a distance which has been the rule for more than 100 years – to 16m (52ft 6 inches). Each garden losing three metres (10ft) is still better than those with apartments having very little outdoor space, Garvey says. “We’ve tried to equalise that everyone would have a fair share of private open space, rather than 60sq m (646sq ft) for a three-bed and nine square metres (97sq ft) for an apartment.”
Bannon points to the Great Kneighton development in Cambridge, England, designed by architects Proctor & Matthews, which, he says, “is held up as one of the best schemes worldwide with regard to compact living”. By hiding cars in integrated garages, it allows for a focus on street life, he says, and that allows neighbours to socialise with each other and share the street, rather than navigating through a maze of cars.
Asked how they would respond to those who say these proposals are simply a means for developers to secure a greater profit for themselves, Bannon bats the question away, saying: “We have to squeeze those numbers of units on to that site in the first place, regardless, that’s the law.
“We’re saying if we can build them differently, we can provide more own-front-door homes rather than half the people living in houses while, for the other half, the only thing going to be available is apartments – and they’re more expensive to build, pushing up the cost of everything over a scheme,” he says.
“Our proposal isn’t just a gain for Glenveagh, it’s a gain for everyone,” says Garvey. “The small builder could do it, the local authority, the Land Development Agency; this is an open book to everyone, that they could do it if they wanted to.”
