If you ever need confirmation that necessity is the mother of invention, you can do worse than watch one of the rash of property programmes on Channel 4. A typical example of this genre was the recent ‘We Are A Boring Retired Couple Who By The Happy Accident of Being Born in 1950 And Having Bought A Five-Bedroom House in 1978 Now Have A Tax-Free Capital Gain Of £600,000 With Which To Buy A Place In France Where We’ll Live On Our Public Sector Pensions At Your Expense (Season 9, Episode 8).’ Programmes of this type are mostly dismal. The pair are shown various pricey properties only to raise fatuous objections: ‘I didn’t like the kitchen, I thought it was just too blue.’
But there is a remarkable outlier amongst all this drivel. It’s called George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces and is an unmitigated delight — because it explains how to do a lot with very little. Throughout the series Clarke, an irrepressibly chirpy architect, is converting a 1970s static caravan of quite remarkable ugliness into a handsome second home for his family. Last week he met a young couple who, with a renovation budget of a little over £300, had transformed their tiny Bournemouth beach hut into a kind of Tardis. They had made padded, stackable storage boxes which could be ingeniously rearranged into a bed, a desk or a dining table seating six.
Watching their attempt, I became far more covetous of their beach hut than of the £600,000 houses in France. In terms of happiness-per-pound it probably wins hands down — indeed the richer couple will probably spend most of their retirement worrying about their septic tank (secret tip for expat Spectator readers — try a powder called Eparcyl, available from your local E. Leclerc).
This brilliant beach hut reminded me Simon Woodroffe’s scheme to build a new generation of Yo! Homes. For the founder of the Yo! Sushi and Yotel chains is now dedicating his talents towards solving the housing shortage. His idea (Google it) is so fiendishly simple it seems odd nobody thought of it before. His proposed homes are the size of a large bedsit. But they function like a large two-bedroom flat. The bed magically rises into a recess in the ceiling to reveal a big sitting room beneath. There is further storage under the floor. A partition can be drawn across the room to create a study — in which the desk can be unfolded into a second bed — only the area occupied by the lavatory is a single-purpose space. Woodroffe’s first job was in the theatre. He has neatly taken the idea of counterweights, as used in stage scenery, to allow a whole double bed to be raised one-handed. The simple truth is that, even if you are Louis XIV, you can only be in one room of your house at any time. This neat approach gives you several different rooms within the space occupied by one.
Such inventions are a reminder that there are two ways of improving the human condition. One is the course favoured by economists, where you make progress by doing more with more. The other is the course taken by the world’s best designers, where you try to do more with less.
It is this second area of innovation which fascinates me most. And so it seems particularly strange to me that design (along with art and music) has been omitted from the proposed curriculum for Michael Gove’s new English Baccalaureate. If there is one field in which the British can find a real competitive advantage, it’s here.
The only good news is that Gove has also forgotten to include dance in the list of Ebacc subjects. If there’s one thing I hate more than property programmes, it’s bloody dance programmes.
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