I have just read an article about Ikea's house projects....and the houses called "boklok". I think the idea is good and the houses are really good from all kinds of perspectives (energy efficient etc..) - but I think they should not sell them fro 100k but for not more then 50k....after all the material costs are probably only 20k for Ikea.

http://www.boklok.co.uk/

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/architecture/story/0,,2048116,00.html

well i dont like the name, but i like the idea..

the only prob is, some look awful, theres no character

yes....and they have chosen ugliest ones for the project in Gateshead...if you look at the pictures of the different kinds of houses they have designed. Maybe, again, it is the building company in the uk that tries to make most profit and they bought the houses for 10k each from Ikea and sell them for 10x the amount...and nobody notices as houses are 160k or more in the UK.

The best thing would have been a roof terrace with a garden on top:

For 60K you could get a house like that from Kampa Haus:



or for 40-50k:



There are also bigger prefabricated ones...only a little bit more expensive (about from 200k onwards...):

see those other houses are well nice, why does the uk get the shite ones

It is because many planning officers will only give you a planning permission for houses with 2 rooms that look crap..so that they fit to the other crap houses in the same road.....so that in the end only the same 3 building companies will be your choice....if you get a planning permission anyway.

There is no land in a nice location you could build on - and if there is it might be some million pounds worth - so an average person will never be able to build a home in a nice landscape....the planning officers will be likely to reply with "there is no need to build at this location".

There should be the following laws to get rid of this problem:

- planning permissions should be known BEFORE a sale.
- laws against "land speculation"
- land with planning permissions should be listed for sale by the local governments and civic offices.
- land with planning permission at reasonable rates should be sold directly by the counties and government and only directly to private buyers - trying to make re-sales impossible within 10 years - or tax them heavily.

The thing is at the moment it works like that:

- someone working as a planning officers finds out some land will be able to receive planning permission.....he tells his brother-in-law who runs a building company....they buy the land as farming land for 50k...get a planning permission and then the land is suddenly worth 2 million....then they build 10 crappy houses on there for 500k and sell them for 2 million.....