Katie Puckett's work

“Life seems more meaningful in a tiny house”

katiepuckett — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:10:47 +0000

Small may be a relative concept when it comes to homes, but there’s no question that the “micro homes” increasingly popular in crowded cities around the world are very, very small indeed. I investigated the phenomenon of shrinking spaces for Modus, the magazine of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, speaking to residents of tiny houses smaller than most people’s garages, office designers condensing the footprint per employee by a third, and psychologists seeking to find out how our diminishing place in the world is changing the way we think.

Lonely at the top

katiepuckett — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:38:53 +0000

On a Wednesday afternoon in early August, Julie Fadden was walking around the streets of Speke and Garston with her staff, talking to her tenants and resolving issues on her estates. The chief executive of South Liverpool Housing was doing what she does on the first Wednesday afternoon of every month – even though her father had died early that morning. This is an extreme example of what sets the chief executive in a housing organisation apart from their staff, but it does shed some light on why the chief executives in Inside Housing’s salary survey are paid so much more than their employees. I spoke to them to find out how they earn their six-figure salaries.

The £800m typo

katiepuckett — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 17:39:02 +0000

On 19 July, when the Cabinet Office released the numbers for construction spending over the next three years, a collective “what the … ?” could be heard across the industry. It was the figures for the Department of Health that set alarm bells ringing – they appeared to show a framework worth £2.9bn over five years tailing off to almost nothing in just three. For PFI meanwhile, on which the government was supposed to have gone lukewarm, spending was to expand rapidly. What was going on? Were these unfamiliar figures the scorched tyre marks from yet another screeching handbrake turn in government policy? I investigated for Building magazine and found there was a very simple explanation… And I also uncovered this news story about a £90m PFI hospital on hold, as healthcare trusts struggle to come to terms with their new financial independence.

A house is not a Home

katiepuckett — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 16:56:49 +0000

Leo Miller’s flash of inspiration came when he nearly burnt down his student house. For Isaac Teece, it was the realisation that if he found changing a light bulb difficult at 21, it was going to be considerably harder in 50 years’ time. They’re the winners of a competition which challenged industrial design students at Northumbria University to come up with ‘inclusive designs’ that would enable elderly or disabled people to live independently. It might seem odd that experiences of life in a student house should influence the design of extra care schemes, but that was the point – the competition’s organisers wanted products that anyone would be happy to have in their homes, and that wouldn’t give them “that sinking feeling that you’re entering older people’s housing”. In this article for Inside Housing, I found out what they came up with.

Extreme home makeover

katiepuckett — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:11:40 +0000

The government told social landlords to bring 3000 empty properties back into use and gave them a £100m fund to do it. Even so, The Willows in Llangolen was not the most obvious place to start. This Grade II-listed mansion had been derelict for 30 years before Denbighshire Council bought it for £1 and then spent £429,000 refurbishing it. It was just after the builders took the roof off that empty homes officer Wendy Dearden wondered if her pet project was such a good idea after all: ‘Someone put their foot on one of the walls and the whole wall, three storeys down, wobbled.’ But a year, and much shoring up of those walls later, The Willows has been converted into three unique, two-bedroom flats right in the city centre – social housing gold dust. I found out how, in this piece for Inside Housing’s construction special.

More adventures in concrete

katiepuckett — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:14:57 +0000

If you’d like a tour of Europe’s most sustainable building, look no further than the summer issue of Concrete Quarterly, which I edit for the Concrete Centre and publisher UBM. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s new Swiss HQ is the only building in the world to have met the exacting standards of both the US LEED environmental rating scheme and Switzerland’s own Minergie – chosen because they were the toughest the client could find. Six different types of concrete went into the structure, and even if it’s unlikely to win any high-flown architectural awards, I think those exposed concrete finishes have a certain charm. Also in this issue: Vodafone’s bonkers-looking new office in Oporto, and a gorgeous aircraft museum in Krakow that’s like a paper aeroplane made out of concrete…

However bad it gets, we still have to eat

katiepuckett — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 13:24:43 +0000

If you think the UK has reached saturation point for supermarkets, think again. In fact, we’re still relatively under-served compared with other European countries and the US – France and Germany have nearly twice as much supermarket space per capita, and the US has triple. All the big chains and quite a few newcomers have been taking an aggressive approach to expansion over the last few years, and they’re not planning on slowing down any time soon, as I found out in this analysis of the supermarkets sector for Building magazine.

How not to get into a fight with a brickie

katiepuckett — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:39:17 +0000

Before I wrote this piece for Construction Manager, I struggled to picture a room of builders discussing their feelings and filling in personality tests. But a growing number of contracting firms are using exactly these methods to help staff win friends and influence people on site. I spoke to the owners of some of the muddiest boots in the business to find out whether you can really teach site management in a classroom, and compiled a handy quiz to help readers identify their own management style.

“You could say they are doomed to fail”

katiepuckett — Tue, 03 May 2011 11:44:36 +0000

A journey into unknown territory … an impossible target … and an estates department determined to go down fighting … Alright, so it’s not exactly Andy McNab, but the challenge facing the Defence Infrastructure Organisation is still pretty dramatic. Over the next four years, the MoD’s new estates division must save £1.2bn from property disposals, direct estate costs, energy and water bills and staff numbers. This means it must cut an organisation with a headcount of more than 7,000 down to just 2,000 people, rationalise a property portfolio worth about £20bn, and reinvent itself from the ground up, with new business processes, IT infrastructure and operating procedures. I spoke to the heads of the DIO to find out how they’re going to do it – and the rest of the construction industry to assess their chances of success.

The Grand Designs paradox

katiepuckett — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 17:45:35 +0000

Admit it: you would secretly love to build your own home. But even though many people will have probably considered it at some time or another, very few of us will ever take the plunge. This is the Grand Designs paradox: the ubiquity of property programmes on TV encourages us all to dream of designing the perfect home, while simultaneously presenting a hellish vision of construction nightmares and financial ruin that ensures only the bravest will ever attempt it. But that could all change if housing minister Grant Shapps achieves his ambition to make self-build a more realistic option. In this article for Construction Manager magazine, I assessed his chances of transforming the UK into a nation of housebuilders.