Customisable flat-pack homes

Through designing specialised modular timber panels, Ramboll enables Swan to offer a truly disruptive housing solution.

With the housing crisis continuing and sustainability becoming expected as-standard, adapting the construction and housing sectors to the shifting demands of the twenty-first century consumer is no mean feat. 

Working holistically to design, test and tailor their product to their client’s specifications, Ramboll’s team have created an innovative new construction method: building homes out of factory-issue laminated timber panels, which slot together for rapid assembly.

 

Standardised ‘module-based’ architecture allows for mass production, whilst also enabling consumers to easily customise their home to suit their needs – adding rooms, extensions, floors and more.

Not only is this a more attractive offer for Swan's consumers, but it is also a more sustainable way of doing construction. With the majority of each build taking place in factories, components can be made to tighter tolerances, with less wastage and requiring 90% fewer site deliveries, whilst the use of timber means that the build is itself carbon-negative.

Thanks to Ramboll’s innovative approach to design, this all comes at no additional cost to a traditional house build of the same scale – mass-customisable housing is no longer the stuff of science fiction. 

The homes form part of a £130 million regeneration project dedicated to transforming Craylands 1960's housing estate with Swan committed to delivering a total of 971 homes, including 230 units of Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) custom build.

Ramboll collaborated with Swan and its custom-subsidiary Nu Living on the design of the factory and the process and the revolutionary thinking considered assembly, transport, lifting and erection, enabling a house to be delivered to site and installed in one to two days. 

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