The idea of having curved rather than angular walls never caught on. Neither did building homes out of plastic, as Alison and Peter Smithson did for the 1956 Ideal Home Show (left). And as for having bathtaps preset to deliver water at just the right temperature, well, the reception was lukewarm. These innovations all appeared in concept houses, and they were each intended to jolt housebuilders out of their "tried and tested" mindset, and inspire the public to demand something different. The struggle continued with the Milton Keynes Future World estate of the mid-1980s. Then in the 1990s we had Nigel Coates' Oyster House, Pierre dAvoine's Slim House and Laing Homes' Innovation House. They were all written up by the press - and none did much to dent the industry's traditionalism. There are many barriers to innovation, from making ideas work in a real building to selling the principles embodied in concept houses to clients. As David Wilson Homes embarks on its own concept house project, it's worth putting it in the context of two others, Pierre d'Avoine's Slim House and Integer's Millennium House, to see how forward thinking the industry is today.
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