The house that unfolds itself in 10 minutes If the thought of having to dig out the electric drill to hang a few pictures on a Sunday afternoon […]

If the thought of having to dig out the electric drill to hang a few pictures on a Sunday afternoon feels like a grind then how would you feel about using one to actually put an entire house together?

According to Oxfordshire-based company Ten Fold Engineering, that’s precisely all you’ll need to put the final touches to one of their miraculous, unfolding houses.

Transportable anywhere on the back of a lorry, the British firm has, it claims, been inundated from countries around the world, all eager to either buy or understand the new way of building.

The technology, which is fully developed, works on a system of counterbalanced linkages, so there isn’t even a need for a central motor, just a cable which starts the process whereby the house simply “pushes out” from the centre, roughly taking around 10 minutes to assemble. The cable can then be pulled again and the process is reversed.

Here it is in action

Furniture and other household elements are carefully tucked away inside, whilst the houses – which would cost around £100,00 – are transported so there’s no need for a removal truck. The company says that one of its units expands to three times its transportable size with 20m3 of furniture space. However, Ten Fold insists these are not caravans – there are no wobbly floors and it will not blow away.

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Providing the answer to Britain’s housing crisis

And it’s not just houses the firm is concentrating its resources on. It says the linkages at the heart of their structures can be applied to everything from pop-up shops and mobile viewing platforms to operating theatres and even simple road barriers. The buildings can also be stacked to form much larger structures.

Ten Fold’s founder and CEO David Martyn, an architect, believes that his houses could partly provide the answer to the British housing crisis, but says, to his surprise, that it is the UK that has been least interested in his company as he continues to be flooded with offers and interest from countries as far away as New Zealand, Australia and the US.

Martyn tells the i that one of his company’s guiding philosophies is making a difference, especially regarding younger people who are increasingly being priced out of the property market. His hope is that they could own a home but not the land, therefore eventually shifting the dynamic in the UK and other countries where costly land value is what drives prices up.

“The problem we’ve got today is that the young can’t afford to buy anything and the older people can’t afford to trade down,” says Martyn. “So the idea of taking the building away from the land – that represents a saving of about 30 per cent.

“So far, in the past five weeks, we’ve been approached by armies, governments, states and cities and almost every private operation you can conceive of – but we’ve had extraordinary little feedback from the UK,” he added.

The firm says that there is a lot of land in the UK, with developers often “land banking” until the land they own increases in value. This could therefore be used to house his movable structures which they rather unsnappily call ‘transportable property assets’. Martyn even suggests car parks could be used to temporarily store his houses.

“In the US houses and land are dictated by jobs – if there aren’t any jobs, they don’t have any value,” he says. “In the UK, we have this idea that if you’ve paid for it, it’s always worth money. My argument is that there’s lots of land out there and you could be building new things.

“They can be on brownfield sites or even car parks and so could relieve some of the social burdens.”

Providing for those in need

He says he also feels strongly about using his homes to provide for those most in need – from those who are stranded by natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods – to terrible events closer to home.

“To have these buildings you can respond to the challenges we have such as not enough hospital beds or not being able to house your own people when one block of flats catches fire – that is an outrage that there was no response system put in place for [Grenfell].”

It was not so much of a eureka moment which led Martyn to developing his idea of the linkage design system but a process he developed over several years while talking to engineers around 10 years ago.

At first, his design which he initially developed in paper form was met with much scoffing from fellow colleagues who said the mathematics wasn’t right and his design wouldn’t work. But Martyn pressed on and scaled up his designs to cardboard and then to wood. Only then did others begin to realise he might be onto something. After spending millions on prototypes, he eventually patented his idea.

“This is the first new bit of lever engineering in many hundreds of years. That is a hugely positive step. It’s the ultimate bit of Victorian engineering but with the modern advantages of steel and things like that,” claims Martyn.

Factory built

He says that there are other advantages such as the buildings being factory built, meaning they can be worked on 24-hours a day in shifts rather than the traditional 8 hours outside. They also don’t need the wet trades such as plasterers which often slow the building process down. A block would currently take about a week to construct. However, he admits, that such is the interest, the company’s biggest issue is currently finding enough space and manpower to deal with the orders.

The buildings themselves could either be stand-alone – using new technology such as ‘atmospheric moisture harvesting’ where water vapour is condensed in the air and brought to your drinking system – or it can be plugged into the mains.

“The core unit is designed so that you could have internal, pre-plumbed pods or you can put bolt-on pods on the outside. The idea is that the technology is modular so you can fit it to your needs,” says Martyn.

It remains to be seen whether the design can have an effect on the UK’s incredibly rigid housing system, but Martyn remains optimistic:

“This is not about Tenfold making big bucks, it’s about a really good idea, seeing its moment and helping a lot of people.”