MORE than 50 houses of the future will be built on the outskirts of Inverness in a project that got under way yesterday.
The UK's first eco-housing fair will take place in August to showcase new sustainable home designs and interiors.
Based on a Finnish model, the fair will feature 54 showhomes, 40 per cent of which will be affordable housing and the remaining 60 pe
r cent available for sale.
Wayne Hemingway, the Red or Dead founder and a pioneer of social housing, is acting as an ambassador for the event.
He said: "If we continue to allow house builders to build identikit rabbit hutches, which research regularly shows are largely unloved by a population in the grip of a major housing shortage, we will find ourselves pulling them down in 30 years, in the same way that we are now pulling down our mistakes of the 60s and 70s.
"We need to start raising the bar for architecture and design, to create sustainable homes designed to meet people's needs, while acting as a sound investment in our future.
"Quantity and quality really can go hand in hand and affordable housing can also be superbly designed. We just need to make this the norm."
Fiona Porteous, the Highland Housing Fair project manager, said: "Given fossil fuels are fast running out, the current housing model we have in the UK is just not sustainable.
"There needs to be a change in the way new homes are designed and built so they can be made from sustainable resources in the future and will have no need of traditional energy resources."
Ivor Davies, research fellow at Napier University's centre for timber engineering, who is advising the fair's architects, said the designs aimed for high environmental quality.
The full article contains 302 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
