At Views, it’s always our ambition to build what matters now and in the future. We want to create high-quality schemes that enable communities to thrive and provide value way beyond the bricks and mortar they’re made from. The key to achieving these goals lies in thinking more broadly about the places we create and the role they can play in people’s lives.
When we reactivate a residential site, we have an opportunity to create somewhere people genuinely want to live and a neighbourhood that can thrive long after we’ve finished building. During that process, we make thousands of decisions about everything from the layout of individual rooms to parking, landscaping and the relationship between homes and shared spaces.
Those decisions need to have a purpose and a reason behind them. Otherwise, whatever decision you make is mere speculation.
We’re looking to develop our own approach to housebuilding, stay curious, listen to the people who’ll potentially live in the schemes we deliver, and provide something new that may not have always been available to buyers. In this article, we want to highlight some research we’ve been carrying out to better understand what residents actually want from their homes and neighbourhoods.
Building what matters starts with understanding what matters
As an ambitious housebuilder at the start of our journey, we have an opportunity to establish what a Views home should be. The easiest approach would be to look at what established housebuilders are already delivering, identify what appears to work and create our own version of it.
But that’s the wrong direction of travel. We don’t learn much about what customers want by iterating on what’s already out there.
Instead, we wanted to start with the customer. Who are the people likely to buy our homes? How do they actually use them? What matters to them when they’re choosing somewhere to live? What frustrates them about existing homes and what could make their everyday lives better?
Those questions are particularly important because the way we use our homes continues to change. Working patterns have shifted, lifestyles are evolving and people’s expectations of their homes are different from those of previous generations. The home has to accommodate an increasingly broad range of activities and different households need very different things from the same amount of space.
The starting point for this research project was a broad survey and is now moving into more detailed focus groups with the different customer profiles we expect to encounter. We’re not trying to produce a single perfect house type that will be delivered as a cookie-cutter template across all our developments. Instead, the purpose is to develop a deeper understanding of our customers that can inform the decisions we make across different homes and locations.
Questioning the assumptions we build into homes
One of the most useful aspects of carrying out research like this is discovering where assumptions don’t necessarily match reality. We’ve all got our preconceptions and biases that we bring to a project like this. That’s because we all have different experiences and come from different backgrounds.
There are plenty of established ideas about what a new home should contain and how different spaces should work. Especially in the UK, where the suburban 3-bed semi with a private garden and a garage has reigned supreme for decades. However, when you begin asking people how they actually live and what’s important to them, the answers can be much more nuanced.
The differences between households with and without children have been particularly interesting. Preferences around open-plan living, separate living spaces and bathrooms/en suites can all be influenced by whether people need the ability to separate different activities and members of the household. What works brilliantly for one buyer could be completely impractical for another.
Garages are another point of interest. Traditionally, their dimensions and design are dictated by their primary purpose, which, as you can probably guess, is parking a car. Yet our research suggests an increasing numbers of buyers are far more likely to think about that space in terms of storage, exercise or other uses. That raises an interesting design question. If people aren’t using a space in the way the industry assumes they are, or the way they may have traditionally been used, should we continue designing it around that assumption?
None of these pieces of insight will provide a definite answer about how we should design a home. But they do encourage us to question conventions and make decisions based on a better understanding of the people we’re building for.
Thinking beyond the front door
Let’s think about the neighbourhoods in which a home sits.
It’s relatively straightforward to arrange houses efficiently across a site, provide the required infrastructure and make the numbers work. But efficiency is one thing. What about creating great places to live?
In our research, we considered the spaces between homes as well as the homes themselves. How much do people value communal green space? How important is private outdoor space? Could parking be approached differently? Would residents rather have every available piece of land divided between individual plots or sacrifice some private space to create something better for the neighbourhood as a whole?
Some of the responses have opened up interesting possibilities. People moving from apartments, for example, expressed a desire for access to outdoor space without necessarily wanting the responsibility of maintaining a private garden. That suggests alternative approaches to communal gardens and central green spaces could be considered, potentially creating more attractive environments and places where neighbours naturally encounter one another.
It also reinforces the importance of understanding the wider location. Access to local healthcare facilities emerged as a particularly important consideration for our respondents, alongside the other amenities and infrastructure that shape people’s experience of where they live.
This wider, more holistic view of development is a massively important part of enabling neighbourhoods to truly thrive. You can do a great job of building a beautiful home that ticks every box inside its boundary line, but if the wider setting isn’t right, people won’t want to live there.
Investing in the things people value
If you understand what buyers value, you can make better decisions about where investment can have the greatest value.
There will always be a commercial reality to housebuilding. Homes need to be deliverable and affordable, and every design decision ultimately has a cost attached to it. Whether the cost is justifiable or not should come down to whether that money is being spent on something that genuinely improves the experience of the people living there.
An expensive material or high-end finish might look impressive on a specification sheet, but that doesn’t automatically make it valuable to the customer. Better storage, a more useful layout, improved communal space or technology that reduces the cost of running a home could have a much greater effect on someone’s everyday life and in most cases will be the better investment.
Take energy, for example. Our research suggests people aren’t necessarily thinking about energy efficiency as an abstract measure of how sustainable their home is. They’re interested in what different technologies mean for their household bills. Solar technology proved particularly popular, while other technologies generated a more mixed response.
As policies like the Future Homes Standard change the way homes are designed and built, understanding those attitudes can help us think carefully about how we deliver the environmental performance new homes need while creating tangible benefits that residents recognise and value.
Homes that keep getting better
We’re still deep in the process of this research and when we have the completed findings, we’ll certainly come back and revisit this topic in another article. The next stage now is to finish the focus group research and to explore some of the findings in more detail. At the moment, we know what people prefer, but not necessarily why. This is an important part of the puzzle.
The process is also an ongoing one. This won’t be a one-and-done where we get all the insight we need and never revisit the topic. Human behaviour is malleable and changes year by year. We’ll continue listening to residents into the future to inform our work. This is particularly true of the people who purchase our properties. Once they move into their new homes, we’ll engage with them through the aftercare period, actively seek feedback and use what we learn to inform future developments.
When we get feedback, the important thing is doing something with it. We don’t want resident engagement to become a box-ticking exercise or useful feedback to disappear into a file somewhere. We want it to contribute to a process of continuous improvement, influencing individual house types, masterplans and the way we approach future sites.
Taking the end user seriously, learning from them and using that learning to implement positive changes is a massively powerful way to deliver schemes that matter now and in the future.