What makes a great family home?

The ground floor has a living room and utility room. Upstairs there is a kitchen and dining room overlooking the living room, and bathroom. The bedrooms are on the upper two floors. “With these houses you either love the architecture, like us, or you hate it,” said Mrs Oliver. The Olivers are moving to live in the country and the property’s limitations — it is not huge and has only a small courtyard garden — are reflected in its asking price of £265,000 (the modernhouse.net).

Postwar architecture has a doleful reputation. Common wisdom has it that bricks (of the red variety) and mortar are the only safe option, aesthetically and financially.

Abbott — who liked the estate he built so much that he lived there himself — blames Britain’s conservative planning system. “I cannot stand the attitude of the planners,” he says. “People do not like anything that is different, and that is why there is so little truly modern architecture in Britain.”

Ben Humphrey, a mortgage broker (benhumphrey.com), says banks will lend on such properties. “A lot of the Sixties estates were built with a limited life span; meant to last only 30 or 40 years. There is no way you will get anyone to lend on properties like that. But quality homes will be treated just like anything else.”

One home that was built to last is the Rotunda, within the gates of Bushy Park, in West London. The property began as a weapons testing centre in the Second World War. After the war the building was reinvented as a family house. The designers retained the bomb-proof 4ft-thick curved concrete walls, added a copper roof and glazing to create a crescent-shaped house with seven bedrooms, set in 1.3 acres of walled gardens. It is on the market with Knight Frank (knightfrank.com) for £4 million.

A former Gas Board laboratory, the pre-cast concrete Piper Building in Fulham, proves that even the most lumpen building can be recycled.

It was bought by a developer just over a decade ago and reinvented as 77 loft-style flats, a three-bedroomed example of which is on the market with Foxtons (foxtons.co.uk) for £775,000. It is open plan inside with high ceilings and has a balcony overlooking the block’s communal courtyard.

The architectural historian Albert Hill, a director of The Modern House, which specialises in contemporary property, says buyers are spooked by “the shock of the new”.

“People would be happy to move into a Victorian house riddled with problems, but this [Sixties] period has been demonised. These houses are no more troublesome than any other house, they are just not everyday.

“The upside is that this was an idealistic time for architects. They were positive about creating a new world, and so the care that has gone into the detailing of the buildings is incredibly well planned. They are the avant-garde of how people want to live.”

Terraces?

Terrace housing — is it the best type ever? Experts are beginning to wonder. Not so long ago they were typecast as snug boxes for the poor, but as the housing boom bought buyers scurrying in from the suburbs, terraces regained their reputation as a handsome symbol of urban regeneration.

The detached home appears to represent all that is in demand now — space, privacy and land — and prices are close to boomtime highs. But analysis from Savills, the agent, shows how, over ten years, terraces have outperformed all other property types in six out of nine regions in the UK, increasing in value by 149 per cent, compared with an average of 126 per cent.

So, why do we love them? The Georgian and the Victorian versions have proved to be remarkably flexible. The larger ones have been converted to pleasing apartments, and back again, as their neighbourhoods have gone down, then up, in the world. But the two-up, two-down version built for workers can, with a small extension, house a young professional in need of a home office, a family with several children, or even a set of downsizing grandparents. How many flats, or detached homes, can boast that?

Now terraces have received the ultimate seal of approval: the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) will this spring hold a course to recognise their merits and ensure that owners take proper care of them. Marianne Suhr, of the BBC’s Restoration show and the course leader, says: “If you ask an architect where they live, often it is in a Georgian terrace. The rooms are lovely shapes, the windows large and the layouts are perfect for 21st-century family living.”

Her co-author on the Old House Handbook, Roger Hunt, says that there are fewer maintenance challenges because “you only have the front, the back and the roof to worry about”. A Lloyds TSB Insurance survey put the annual average maintenance bill for a terrace house at £1,672, compared with £3,090 for a detached home.

Spencer Cushing, of the agent John D Wood & Co, is also a fan. “Although they were thrown up quickly, with little depth to their foundations, they will still be standing long after your average new-build,” he says.

In the Winchester office of Savills, Steven Moore points out that local terraces range from “magnificent Georgian townhouses to tiny early Victorian cottages”. Their location close to the centre of town make them “popular and pound per square foot incredibly expensive”.

There are naysayers, of course. Nigel Lewis, of FindaProperty.com, warns of noise from next door and limited access, while Cliff Gardiner, of the Buying Solution, the search agent, says: “The majority in London are four or five storeys with lots of stairs and often have small rooms. Truly special terraced houses are quite rare unless they have been extended in some way.”

Extended in some way. There’s the rub: we may love our terraces, but few of us are willing to live in the homes as they were originally intended. Suhr believes that the current vogue for vast open-plan extensions need not be a problem; it’s a common improvement that would not have been disapproved of by William Morris, the SPAB founder, who believed additions should be “of their time”. Hunt counsels home improvers to take into account the entire row. He says: “A terrace can be wrecked by one person changing the windows and property values can be affected as a result.”

Despite its flaws, the terraced form is being rediscovered by developers trying to shrug off the legacy of cheek-by-jowl apartments blamed for the collapse of the new-build market as a way of boosting density while giving buyers their own front door and a patch of private garden.

www.spab.org.uk

Or a mix of the two

Would you like to adore a glass-and-concrete statement, but are not sure you could give up the charm of your terrace? An exhibition of award-winning extensions, at New London Architecture on Store Street, London WC1, shows how you can have both.

This extension, on Mapledene Road, in Hackney, East London, pictured below, is by Platform 5 Architects and has won praise for opening up the ground floor “to the garden and the sky”. The architect Alison Brooks described it as “just about perfect”. The exhibition continues until January 30, but a day of special talks, workshops and promotions at the furniture retailers on nearby Tottenham Court Road will be held on Saturday, January 23. Consider yourself inspired.

newlondonarchitecture.org