For some years, the German timber home industry’s participation in the English housing market has been restricted to a few select, high value projects, with Huf Haus being the most obvious name in the mix.
But a growing tide of German companies have now turned their attentions to the UK with their offering of advanced, highly prefabricated homes.
Baufritz launched its UK operation a year ago at the Grand Designs show in London. At this year’s event it displayed a full-size “carbon positive” show home and was also able to tell people of the completion of its first UK build – near Padstow, in Cornwall.
The timber-clad traditional style property, featuring Baufritz’s closed panel technology, took just two days to erect and incorporates solar panels, reclaimed Cornish slate roof and a bore hole for fresh water.
Other projects in the pipeline include a house in Bath, to feature on Grand Designs next spring, a house in Newmarket and Baufritz is also in discussions with a developer about building an eco village consisting of 20-25 semi-detached homes in the Midlands.
“We came to the UK to focus on individual homes,” said Baufritz marketing manager Amanda Politzer. “But a lot of developers have come to us because they like the quality.”
PlatzHaus, which came to the UK in March 2006, has sold three houses in the UK so far. Its first project will be an architect-designed house in Scotland, on the shore of Loch Tay. Modelled on a Scottish long house on a 55-acre site, the house will be 27m long by 7m wide. The 3,000ft2 building will be erected in late June and will feature a rounded zinc roof, large glass sections overlooking the loch and larch cladding.
Contemporary designs
“People are more aware that if they spend some money and find a plot where they want to live, they do not need to buy the conformed UK houses,” said PlatzHaus UK’s Helmut Gross. “And the planning authorities are more prepared for contemporary designs because they all watch television.”
Brighton-based OSM Homes Ltd, whose manufacturing partner is Streif in Germany, is now starting its first development – 18 homes for Blue Sonic Developments in Lewes. The two blocks of five terraced houses and one block of eight units will be of traditional English appearance incorporating a brick outer skin on the ground level and Siberian larch cladding on first level. A second phase of 33 houses will follow on the site.
It is also building an eco-friendly house at Stoke-on-Trent College’s Burslem Campus in co-operation with Renew North Staffordshire. And it is partnership with NGM Developments, a developer which specialises in floating homes and hopes to build 600 units in the next four years.
Technology transfer
“We want to have a technology transfer taking the best out of German engineering, teaming up with English partners and creating an English product,” said OSM’s Hans Kohl.
Huf Haus thinks the market is big enough for everyone. “We are a niche market but it is growing,” said Huf sales and marketing executive Afra Bindewald.
Huf has now been in the UK for nine years. In its first year it completed four homes, but now it is building 40 a year.
“The attitude towards premanufactured timber building has changed a lot,” said Ms Bindewald. “Previously people were not that receptive – they still had that image of post-war construction in the back of their mind.
