Dan Heyworth Director, Arhaus
I've never owned a classic car and I don't think I ever will. Mind you, if my neighbour owned one I'd happily take it for a spin when he's away, just to keep it ticking over, of course. It would no doubt be an object of beauty and desire; a snapshot of a generation's particular design aesthetic.
Cars, in many ways, are an easy analogy for homes. They're both high-value items that may require finance. We buy them on a whim (how many people actually get to spend a night in a house before they decide to buy it?), require substantial maintenance - increasingly over time - and often represent the way we want people to see us.
I have a friend of whom I'm kind of envious, though for totally irrational reasons. He owns a monument of a house, designed in the early-1970s by a well-known New Zealand architect. It's an object of beauty; a real collector's piece. But to all intents and purposes it's a bit of a dog.
The roof leaks, windows leak, the maintenance is worthy of a duke's private estate. So is the heating bill. Vast expanses of glass suck out any warmth. The roof is too thin to install any meaningful insulation. Curtains would simply ruin the look. You're starting to get my drift - it's lovely to visit, but to actually live there you'd have to give me the vintage Porsche that sits in the garage (which, incidentally, is subsiding).
To torture the car analogy further, we have our vintage, designed-by-renowned-architects homes which bear testament to the knowledge and fashion of a time. They are inefficient to run, any work on them should be done by a suitably qualified and expensive expert, and parts are difficult and expensive to replace.
Most of us live in homes designed by building companies or private individuals, often with the help of an "architectural designer". We're not so precious about these homes and generations of owners happily re-mould them to suit the "modern" way of living. Replacement parts abound, homes have less glass and fewer tricky details so are cheaper to run and maintain. Sadly, a few of us live in badly designed homes where, if something goes wrong (for instance, a leak), it could well be terminal.
Finally, there is another car/house analogy I want to labour. It's something I continually annoy the architect fraternity with - I believe architects have a broken and outdated business model. The more architects in New Zealand complain about the dearth of good mainstream residential architecture (currently less than 5 per cent of all houses built), the more I'm convinced of it. I remember listening to the chief designer at one of the more common European car brands. He was explaining how proud he is of his designs, yet by the time they get into production, they're never quite what he envisaged.
Just like producing a car, when designing and building a home there is so much to take into consideration. Energy performance, durability, aesthetics, acoustics, lighting, material performance, kitchen design, engineering, landscaping, water reticulation, passive heating and cooling, construction efficiency and, importantly, cost. All these areas of expertise, plus those I've missed, need to be co-ordinated and delivered by a production manager.
Car companies would never ask the designer to fulfil the role of production manager because his bias would be towards the aesthetic at the expense of other equally important considerations. Project management is a different skill and quite often I feel architects are being asked to take on too much. Individual architects and small firms still take on the responsibility for residential projects and the industry has a reputation for over-delivering the aesthetic elements and under-delivering on performance, cost, durability and efficiency.
The proof is that builders, landscapers, interior designers and lighting designers are rarely consulted during the design processes. And even if they had something to add, the architect would naturally be biased towards his own solution.
A number of interesting new business models have popped up in the United States and Britain which address this, and it will be fascinating to watch how this goes. This may be the subject of my next article or maybe even the next business venture. Ultimately, something has to change because penetration of good architect-aided house design into the mainstream market is failing.
Arhaus is a sustainable building company.
