Vanessa Hale
Director, Research
How we use our homes throughout our lives changes. And while many will move as their needs change, others are looking to buy a home that can change with them. Vanessa Hale, a research partner, looks at how we can make homes more adaptable.
When buying a forever home, you’ll need to look for a property that can adapt to your ever-changing needs.
The problems
In the past, you’d have a starter home, then maybe a larger property before moving into the family home. When the kids flew the nest, you might retire into a small property. But these days things are a bit different.
Alternative family structures are becoming more common. In our Housing Futures report, we found that 15% of homemovers intend to live as ‘The Waltons’ - multiple generations under one roof, a rise from 10% in the previous survey.
This is becoming a more common trend and ties in with the so-called sandwich generation. These are parents whose children can’t afford to get on the property ladder and so live in the family home, while also having to find room in the home for their parents who can no longer live independently.
And the figures back up these findings. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) says 3.3 million people aged between 20 and 34 still live with their parents, the highest total since the statistic was first recorded in 1996. And the Royal Mail's Home Movers Study found that 21% of the parents who had moved house over the last 6 months bought somewhere bigger, as they expect their children to stay with them until they're in their late 20s or even older.
Our survey found that 1 in 10 expect to be living in a household that does not fall into the traditional "2.4 children" bracket by the end of the decade.
It means that a home now needs to adapt to a variety of comings and goings throughout its lifetime.
The solutions
One solution provided in the Housing Futures report is the "yo-yo house" – a property that evolves with families by moving interior walls or using a garage as living space. Such homes will allow the owner to ‘rightsize’.
Other options to create a yo-yo house include providing easy access to pipes and cables, perhaps by having them surface mounted. This would allow the owner to easily adapt rooms, and install new technology or wireless electricity.
Some of the adaptions that are popular include adding essentially two master bedrooms, each with their own en suite. So if your parents were to move in with you, you wouldn’t need to share a bathroom, giving you both your own privacy. Another option is the ‘granny annex’ in the garden.
Many people are using a floor of the house to convert into a single unit – whether as a flat for their kids or their elderly parents. For children, it can give them their own place to live affordably while saving money to get on the property ladder. For older parents, it’s a more affordable and desirable option for many than going into a care home.
These types of yo-yo properties would be particularly desirable in London, according to our report, with 44% of those moving home in the next five years saying they would choose such a property.
It’s not a new way of thinking – many of London’s Victorian terraces have been adapted into flats over decades. We’re now just doing it a lot more efficiently and more logically. As long as the shell of the home is sound, there’s no reason why older properties can’t be easily adapted.
But many developers are planning new homes to be more adaptive. This means aligning stairwells and plumbing to the right locations so rooms can be easily adapted. This has been done in the commercial world with offices for decades – the shell is static and the interior walls can be moved. There’s no reason why homes can’t be designed more like this.
In America, Lennar has developed, NEXTGEN, a ‘Home within a Home’ concept where separate living spaces for family members are built into a home but have their own entrance, kitchenette and facilities for added privacy.
And closer to home Geraghty Taylor has developed its Livinhome housing model – a new development with a number of standard layouts that can each be altered to accommodate different life patterns and lifecycles reflecting the owners’ design and life choices.
Living alone
There are some adaptions that are also being embraced by those without families but who want a home they can live in throughout their lives.
As people get older, they might need support and specially designed items like walk in showers or the ability to move the majority of things to a single level floor. This could include transforming a downstairs toilet into a bathroom, and the dining room into a bedroom.
Then there is technology – from making sure you have strong and secure WiFi so you’re always connected to the outside world to Telecare tech that can monitor everything from how long you sleep to whether you’ve fallen and can’t get up.