So, work is finally underway on Orchid House. Take a tour, courtesy of the TV news:

The Landmark Houses project started with the selection of 23 of the World’s most exciting and talented designers and launched at the V&A in 2005. The first house to be commissioned and built was the Somerford Villa. There are Eight more designs that have received detailed planning permission from Cotswolds District Council and are currently awaiting commission. There is every likelihood that work will commence on the next in the series - Orchid House - at some point in 2008.

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Here we go - some shots of the location, some words from Will Alsop, some images of the planned properties.

Landmark Houses is quite an undertaking. There are examples of similar schemes elsewhere in the world, such as the Case Studies Programme in California, but there’s never been any guarantee that the concept will translate into the rural landscape. So far, I’m two years into the project with one house built. But here are some words from Kevin McCloud (of Grand Designs fame - pictured right looking suavely unsuited in Lower Mill Estate’s Eco-pool), which enforce the thinking.
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Mies van der Rohe’s famous 1950s modernist Farnsworth House (pictured right - or visit  the official site for more images and some history on the whole project) was built for $73,000, which equates to $500,000 today. When it was sold earlier this year, it went for $7.5m – a 15-fold increase in real value. So is the era of the collectible house upon us?

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Stephen Bayley produced a double page of passionate (and sometimes coruscating) polemic in the Observer last Sunday. His take is that we don’t have to throw up any old rubbish to meet our 3m-homes-by-2020 target. In fact, it’s imperative that we don’t. If we do scatter the countryside with bland boxes, we’ll be doing ourselves and generations to come a serious disservice, and we’ll sew the seeds of future social dysfunction in the process.

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When I saw the plans, my immediate impression was… unbelievable. I thought this can’t be The Cotswolds. It must be California or Switzerland or anywhere else on the globe where good, modern architecture seems to happen naturally. But I was wrong. It is believable and it’s really happening in Gloucestershire.Masterpiece architecture is exciting enough wherever it is built, but there’s something extraordinary here.

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The ‘Landmark Houses’ programme at Lower Mill Estate, in the Cotswold Water Park, has invited architects such as Will Alsop, Eva Jiricna, Sutherland Hussey, Richard Meier and Partners, Roger Sherman, Sarah Featherstone, Alison Brooks, Piers Gough, and Greg Lynn to design a ‘landmark house’ within the incredibly beautiful woodland/waterland panoramas offered by the site
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