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Princely homes that hold their value in every sense

Venetia Thompson

Wednesday, 25th June 2008

Venetia Thompson says that the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment does work that nobody else can and constructs homes that buck current property market trends

Where builders are having to down tools in other financially threatened developments, the Foundation continues to build and sell properties. To an extent that is not fully appreciated, it has proven expert at building or contributing to large-scale projects in ways and locations that others would not: it reaches the parts other architectural forces cannot. The Prince’s aim in Poundbury, Dorset, was to create a town that he would be no less happy to live next to than he would be to live in. Leon Krier’s creation is much more than the toy town of some ill-informed media caricature. Buildings here simply make sense. There is no wandering around trying to find entrances or exits among perspex walls and steel tubing, or bewilderment at reverse cantilevers; just traditional houses built from local materials in keeping with the surrounding area, and local shops stocking local produce, staffed by residents. It is impossible to get lost or find oneself stranded in the middle of a deserted bit of violence-prone ‘dead space’.

The architect Andrés Duany has remarked that the problem of the modern era is still the problem of large numbers. The Modernists always fall back on population growth to defend their incorrigible love of high-rise monstrosities. They are wrong, according to Hank Dittmar, the CEO of the Prince’s Foundation: high density, he says, does not have to mean high-rise. To use Poundbury and the Foundation’s Crown Street development in Glasgow as examples, both exceed the national average of 14.3 dwellings per hectare, with 28.5 and 66.8 respectively, without resorting to building ever upwards.

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