Customisable flat-pack homes

Enabling a truly disruptive housing solution.

Beechwood West

Customisable flat-pack homes

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Enabling a truly disruptive housing solution based around offsite manufacturing.

  • Location

    Basildon, Essex

  • Client

    Swan housing

  • ACE Member

    Ramboll

  • Services

    Product design

  • Project
    Summary

  • Delivery date

    01/08/2017

  • Delivery partners

    Nu Living

  • Project length

    5 years

Through designing specialised modular timber panels, Ramboll enables Swan to offer a truly disruptive housing solution.

With the housing crisis continuing and sustainability becoming expected as-standard, adapting the construction and housing sectors to the shifting demands of the twenty-first century consumer is no mean feat. 

Working holistically to design, test and tailor their product to their client’s specifications, Ramboll’s team have created an innovative new construction method: building homes out of factory-issue laminated timber panels, which slot together for rapid assembly.

 

Standardised ‘module-based’ architecture allows for mass production, whilst also enabling consumers to easily customise their home to suit their needs – adding rooms, extensions, floors and more.

Not only is this a more attractive offer for Swan's consumers, but it is also a more sustainable way of doing construction. With the majority of each build taking place in factories, components can be made to tighter tolerances, with less wastage and requiring 90% fewer site deliveries, whilst the use of timber means that the build is itself carbon-negative.

Thanks to Ramboll’s innovative approach to design, this all comes at no additional cost to a traditional house build of the same scale – mass-customisable housing is no longer the stuff of science fiction. 

Beechwood West - consultancy40ImageSlider

Beechwood West (Swan/NuLiving)

The homes form part of a £130 million regeneration project dedicated to transforming Craylands 1960's housing estate with Swan committed to delivering a total of 971 homes, including 230 units of Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) custom build.

Ramboll collaborated with Swan and its custom-subsidiary Nu Living on the design of the factory and the process and the revolutionary thinking considered assembly, transport, lifting and erection, enabling a house to be delivered to site and installed in one to two days. 

Mathew Riley quote - consultancy40Quote
The industry has been talking about doing things offsite for years, but the impact of technology and the availability of data means that we can analyse and design very differently than we could even ten years ago. We’ve moved from talking about it to advising clients to delivering it.

Mathew Riley

Ramboll