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| Vandeventer and Carlander’s floating home in Seattle, USA |
The home of Sascha Akkermann, one half of German design duo Confused Direction, has all that might be expected of an environmentally friendly, super-contemporary, two-storey residence. It is constructed from a lightweight wood covered with a high-tech sheet material. It has a grass-covered roof, providing insulation and outside space, and a window wall that can be turned towards the sun to allow the starkly modernist 40 sq metre interior to be naturally heated. There is, however, something different about this house: it floats.
“Living in a floating home puts you in touch with nature again, even if you’re very close to a city centre,” Akkermann says of his Silverfish design, moored in Oldenburg, north-west Germany. “It’s a more elemental way of living. You’re close to the water and can feel your home move gently in the wind.”
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| Confused Direction houseboat in Oldenburg, Germany |
That was certainly the thinking for clients of architects Vandeventer and Carlander, in Seattle, US. Their pontoon-based floating home, situated on a lake, has two bedrooms on the lower level, an upper common area and two decks, all linked by a frosted-glass stairwell. The kitchen is all limestone and zebrawood, the flooring exposed concrete. The structure is coated in stylish but weatherproof coloured aluminium and fibre-cement. Demonstrating what is now possible with floating homes, it even has a basement-style space below water level, which also aids stability.
The potential for innovative floating residences taps into a more fundamental appeal. As Chris Hart, managing director of Australian houseboat manufacturer Marine Dynamix, notes: “Waterfront property has always been in high demand and sold for a premium, even in cities in which there’s no shortage of housing. Why? Simply because humans love the water.”
This power of this attraction is underlined by the bookings taken by CPH Living, Copenhagen’s first floating hotel, which opened in June. As well as offering a city centre location, “each of the rooms is extremely quiet, with panoramic views and a sense of calm that comes from being on the water,” says owner Henrik Smith. “The hotel offers a totally different experience. People even hear about it and move from other hotels [in Copenhagen] to stay here.”
And the lure of the water is making itself felt in the UK as well. According to British Waterways, the public body that manages the country’s navigations, an estimated 15,000 people now have some form of houseboat as their primary residence, with another 3,000 being “continuous cruisers”, restricted to residing at a single mooring for no more than 14 days at a time. Anecdotally at least, orders taken by narrowboat builders over recent years have largely been for residential vessels.
While houseboats and floating homes provide more affordable access to inner-city living (or, indeed, the ability to get away from it), their attraction has also grown in the UK thanks to a clean-up of the waterways during the past decade. “A spate of waterside regeneration projects has made them nice places to visit, rather than dodgy places to walk,” says Madge Bailey, British Waterways’ project manager, who suggests that rising environmentalism has also added to the appeal of living afloat, as homeowners seek innovative ways to minimise their carbon footprint.
“That is not to say that houseboat living is something of a hippy pursuit – that’s a very dated perception now,” Bailey says. “Houseboat living is finding increased attraction among people who want to live a low-impact lifestyle by the water without giving up the mod con benefits of living in a building, which today’s designs allow them to do.”
One step closer to nature than bricks and mortar, the contemporary houseboat is often green at heart. Environmentally friendly materials are increasingly used in the construction process and innovative processes are being employed to reduce running costs.
Floating homes also arguably provide a wiser alternative to proposals to build on the flood plains of rivers. The city council in Oxford, central England, is considering a pilot project, operated by the Department of Communities and Local Government and a private developer, to build houses on floating platforms. Floating Concepts, a Manchester-based company promoting such developments, this month installed its first “show boat” in Coburg Dock, Liverpool, north-west England, ahead of a planned scheme, and is seeking a 150-year lease on 4.5 acres of Salford Quays, Manchester, on which to build a modular houseboat-style, mixed-use scheme. Floating homes are similarly under consideration as part of plans by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority.
“Floating homes or houseboats seem a much better use of redundant docklands than filling them in and building on them,” argues David Beard, Floating Concepts’ chief executive. “It is still a radical idea to some. It’s building on water. You just need a different kind of foundation.”
Houseboats of the kind designed by pioneering Copenhagen-based company Waterliving have high insulation standards, are constructed of largely recyclable materials and have waste water treatment systems that make them independent of land-based facilities. Solar panels, accumulation tanks and a specially developed geothermal heat pump – taking its heat from the water rather than land – create the potential for a zero energy house. The cost of heating and electricity for the vessels currently amounts to about £100 a year. Add in the fact that houseboat values are appreciating and investing in one looks like a sound financial move.
Rex Walden, chairman of the UK’s Residential Boat Owners’ Association, stresses that houseboats can now be outfitted to specifications that would compete with any modern show home in everything but space. A new generation of purpose-built residential boats is “ideal for those who want a city apartment but can’t afford it,” he suggests. “Living on the water is a lifestyle choice. You have barristers, road menders and everyone in between living in a community in a way that would never happen with bricks and mortar: there’s the camaraderie of the canal, as it were. But then, nor should anyone planning to live on a boat have unrealistic expectations. The media tends not to show narrowboat life when it’s raining or when the toilet [tank] has to be emptied or when the water supply needs fixing. I know people who have commissioned a boat, had it built, discovered the reality and put it on the market within months.”
Life afloat is certainly not without its complications. Chief among these in the UK is the shortage of residential moorings – in effect the rental of the land against which the houseboat is tied. British Waterways is to attempt to alleviate the situation through talks with the Department of Communities and Local Government.
“There is now a significant demand for residential moorings, both because there are more people who want to live on the water and because of their role in tackling the larger issue of housing provision,” Bailey explains. An estimated 11,000 new berths on inland waterways will be needed in the next decade to keep up with demand from private homebuyers alone. And shortage of moorings is an issue internationally. “Placement is the do or die of the houseboat market,” says Niels Holck, founder of Waterliving, who notes that there are now 2,500 people in Copenhagen waiting for moorings.
“There are lots of conflicting interests. But in our experience it just takes one project to start up – a small community of houseboats, with utilities and parking – for councils to realise that it can work.”
There are signs of progress. When Holck launched Waterliving in 2001 the lack of legislation, both in relation to planning and the technical specifications of the properties, proved so obstructive that he prepared his own paper with building standards. These, after some lobbying, have since been adopted in law. That has not only given buyers the security they want – Waterliving only sells its houseboats together with long-term mooring rights – but allowed the company to take the lead in a fledgling industry. Waterliving has recently signed big orders for houseboats to Germany and Holland, “so we’re selling sand to the Sahara now,” jokes Holck.
“The lack of standards is the reason for houseboat development having had something of a Klondike image,” he adds. “There have been interesting conversions and one-off designs in other places but high-end houseboats produced to a recognised standard is a new idea targeting a market that has to be developed. And it is creating that market. Convincing the public of the potential of houseboats has been an ongoing process. Some people are still surprised that the light switch works, or that the underfloor heating works. But word is spreading.”
Holck believes that the next important step, to be implemented in the coming five years, is production-line assembly of houseboats, in order to drive prices down and democratise access. He notes that, in the current economic climate, orders for his €200,000, 75 sq metre models are considerably more buoyant than those for the €500,000, 160 sq metre “penthouse” styles.
These latter styles, of course, have all the greater wow factor for being on the water. Perhaps this is why, while the authorities in Dubai will not yet allow a permanent residence in a houseboat, they are using the floating home design by Belgian interior designer Leen Vandaele as part of their rebranding activities for The World, their gargantuan artificial island project.
Created in 2003, the 280 sq metre, glass-walled prototype has subsequently become popular for event hire. With its spartan all-white interior, streamlined fixtures and remote-control steering, this is about as far from preconceptions of cramped, inconvenient living on water as you can get. Vandaele is now looking for backers to develop the concept for retail, as office space and as a hotel suite.
“It seemed fitting to launch it in Dubai because it’s so accepting of crazy architectural ideas,” Vandaele says. “The notion of a houseboat is not a new one, of course. It’s traditional to the likes of Holland or India and goes back centuries. But the look of this concept is so far from the traditional, it tends to give those who see it a fresh perspective on just what is possible with living on the water now.”
