The venue was the Building Centre, the event, its exhibition of the winners in the government’s Design for Manufacture competition which challenged UK construction to devise the “£60,000” house.
The centrepiece was the entry from the SixtyK consortium, a two-bedroom house which was actually built on the pavement outside the Centre. Inside, the house is light and spacious and its highly efficient insulation and design features for controlling solar gain mean that it needs minimal heating in the winter and stays comfortably cool in the summer.
Most importantly for this industry, it is based on prefabricated timber structural insulated panels from Kingspan TEK. It was also fitted out with wood floors, doors and windows to add to its eco-performance and “natural appeal”. And appeal it did. The house had a steady stream of visitors. Among them was deputy prime minister John Prescott, but you can’t win them all.
Of course, timber traders up and down the land won’t be stocking SixtyK-style houses. But the growing number and take-up of these hi-tech timber-based building systems clearly strengthens the perception that timber and wood products provide high performance, environmentally superior construction and manufacturing solutions. That has to have a knock-on in the market as a whole.
That’s the good news. The cautionary note from John Brownlie of BSW Timber addressing The Timber Trade Federation (TTF) International and UK Suppliers Division, was that the industry will only reap maximum reward from the drive to sustainable construction if it steps up its marketing and lobbying – an opinion reinforced below by Timbmet’s Simon Fineman.
In addition, said Mr Brownlie and Mark Plews of UCM Timber, the trade must show that it is going the extra mile on the environmental front. For members of the TTF both said emphatically that this means signing up to and unequivocally supporting The Federation’s Responsible Purchasing Policy.
