Lifetime Homes: the 16 steps

Lifetime Homes, as a concept, has been around since 1991. The idea is to make housing usable by people of all abilities and in all phases of life, including childhood. It’s not just about the disabled!

It was developed by a group of housing experts, drawn together by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. A few of the ideas were incorporated into Part M of the England & Wales Building Regulations in 1999, but the Lifetime Homes concept as a whole is still only widely used by Housing Associations. The Code for Sustainable Homes awards eco points for building to Lifetime Homes standard and, as it stands, the standard will have to be incorporated into all new homes by 2016. You won’t be able to score the 90% rating required to meet Level 6 of the Code without it.

There are 16 design features which combined make up the Lifetime Homes standard:

• Car parking space should be easily capable of enlargement to attain a width of 3300mm

• The distance from the car parking space to the home should be kept to a minimum and should be level or gently sloping

• The approach to all entrances should be level or gently sloping

• All entrances should be illuminated

• Communal stairs should provide easy access and where levels are reached by lift, the lift should be fully wheelchair accessible

• Doorways and hallways have to be at least 750mm wide, or at least 900mm wide when the approach is head-on

• Dining and living areas should have space for turning a wheelchair and there should be adequate circulation space for wheelchair users

• The living space should be at the level of the entrance

• If homes of two or more storeys, there should be space at entrance level which should be used as a convenient bed space

• The design of the property should incorporate a provision for a future stair lift and a suitably identified space for a through-the-floor lift from the ground to the first floor

• The design of the property should provide for a reasonable route for a potential hoist from a main bedroom to the bathroom

• There should be a WC situated at the entrance level of the property and a drainage provision enabling a shower to be fitted in the future

• Walls in the bathrooms and toilets should be capable of taking adaptations such as handrails

• The bathroom should be designed to incorporate ease of access to essential amenities such as the bath, basin and WC

• Living room windows should begin 800mm from the floor or lower and be easy to open

• Switches, sockets, ventilation and service controls should be situated between 450mm and 1200mm from the floor

Comment
Most of these features can be incorporated into most house designs fairly easily and with minimal additional cost. The ones that are likely to cause problems for designers are:

• The requirement for larger bathrooms, especially the future proofing of the downstairs loo as a potential wet room. In small houses, this is a considerable space eater

• Future-proofing a lift shaft: again this is tricky in small houses

• Wide parking spaces

Ideally, from a Lifetime Homes point of view, we would all be living in generous bungalows. However, this runs completely counter to the prevailing mood in planning which demands that we squeeze as much as possible living space into the available footprint. Indeed, another part of the Code for Sustainable Homes awards points for using the basement and/or the loftspace. It’s not difficult to build a four-storey house that conforms to Lifetime Homes standard, but arguably it goes against the spirit of what Lifetime Homes is all about, which is making the whole house accessible to the physically impaired. Box ticking 1 Common sense 0.

New urban design in practice

I made my second visit to Upton this week. For those of you not in the know, Upton is the new Poundbury. Sort of. It’s an urban extension (fancy modern term for a housing estate), tacked onto the edge of Northampton, and it’s full of weird and wonderful homes. I was there as part of a Princes Foundation seminar group and the guiding hand of this group is evidenced all over the development, though its much more diverse than Poundbury. Although at first glance it looks all very traditional, there are modernist schemes here as well and Bill Dunster’s Zed factory is hard at work on one corner delivering what they claim to be the first Code for Sustainable Homes Level 6 homes onto the market.

Only the southern side of the development is complete, the rest is still very much a building site. However, enough is there to give an impression of what it will be like when all 1200 homes are all done and dusted. In many ways, it’s the complete antithesis of selfbuild. Like Poundbury, the whole scheme is about urban design and master planning, building model settlements where everything is thought through and everything hopefully functions smoothly. It’s just as much about social engineering as it is architecture and consequently it all has a rather prissy, manicured feel to it.

But behind the glossy veneer of this exemplar development, most of the work is being undertaken by warts–n-all housebuilders and developers, and it’s not an easy site for them. Kim Slowe, of Cornhill Estates, one of the Upton developers, who cut his teeth at Poundbury, gave a very interesting presentation to the group and was quite upfront about the problems encountered. “Whereas homes in Poundbury sell for between £230 and £260 per square foot, up here in Upton we are lucky to get £165. It’s a very different social mix and quality building is a much harder sell. It’s challenging.”

And whereas the scheme density, the parking restrictions and the pepperpotting of social housing throughout the site doesn’t appear to cause any problems in Poundbury, these issues have all become thorns for the developers trying to woo in private buyers at Upton. By way of example, Slowe indicated that theft of building materials was an ongoing issue on this site. “It’s all very well using lead-lined canopies over the front doors, but the lead keeps getting stripped off.” Just around the corner from Slowe’s houses, I walked straight into the evidence that this was indeed the case – see image.

The verdict on the success or otherwise of Upton will be some time in coming, but you have to admire the vision and drive which enabled it all to get out of the ground. Do take a detour to go and visit the scheme and make your own mind up.


BTW, it’s not very well signposted. It’s on the western fringe of Northampton, next to the Sixfields football ground, the home of Northampton Town FC. Set your sat nav for NN5 4EZ and it should take you to Upton Square, the pulsing heart of the place, right next to the brand new primary school.