Charlie Dalton from Zedbox (early model pictured above) discusses his view of the micro home market exclusively for The Micro Life.
Creating a building that we can manufacture
in component form that's desirable, pretty, robust, moveable,
affordable and conforms with building regulations in both England and
Scotland is very complicated! I'm so very, very excited.
As I child I was always designing small
house layouts, and have always been intrigued by real home ergonomics.
Now as fifty year old, I still feel it's my calling. I first decided to
produce MicroHomes a decade ago, but it was too
early for the market and I simply didn't have the resources. Designing
and manufacturing garden offices and studios has been a great way into
developing the product and the market [Charlie is also the MD of Smart Garden Offices]. But I started properly with the
initial brief in 2013, but day to day business
got in the way. The first prototype was started in 2015, but I was
unhappy with a lot of factors and features. In summer 2016 we invested
in the product development unit and since then we've been able to get to the standards I
want.
Since 2001, I've been asked on a regular
basis "can I live in this? " about my garden offices, so I've always
known there'll be substantial demand for a properly specified
MicroHouse.
I suspect, and it's only an educated guess,
that once the market is established that between 35,000 - 50,000
MicroHomes will be built each year. I anticipate it will only take 5
years for that market to come about. I'm more excited
about the MicroHome market now than I was about the garden office
market in 2001. The real impact on creating homes, in volume, for the
next generation will come about - not by large scale, long term building
projects and new towns - but by increasing the
density of the existing house stock, quickly, cheaply, sustainably and
subtly. If only the regulations about permitted development rights could
be improved!
I'm certainly feeling bullish about the
opportunities for wide scale low impact housing, but I was really
shocked by the initial reaction to the first visuals of Zedbox. I knew
it was a pretty building, based on my popular Ultra
garden office, so hoped for positive reactions. I did a simple post on
LinkedIn and within a week I had 26,000 likes and four thousand
comments. In 10 days we generated over 10,000 direct enquiries. It took
me eight years for me to do that with Smart!
Demand from that one post has come from 124 countries. We'll be exporting from later this year.
We're immediately extending our production
capacity here at Thurston, and we'll be increasing our existing
workforce from 50 to sixty. We've earmarked another £250,000 of
investment in machinery. In due course, I'm planning that
with our additional factory we'll be manufacturing anywhere up to 5,000
homes a year
I think it's important to differentiate a
Tiny house from a MicroHome. For me, a tiny home is a small, often
wheeled, home built, home spun, often a DIY project that's regularly off
grid (very popular of course in the wide spaces
of the USA). A MicroHome however is a professionally produced building
where the owner simply buys a finished product. It's typically suburban,
conforms with all the building codes and is resolutely ongrid. It's
mostly as an instant alternative to a house
extension, and I believe, will increasingly be enjoyed as a living
space option by multi-generational families.
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