funda House

7 February 2020

Why this project?
By making use of data, funda wants to arrive at housing types that better meet the demands of residents. That is why funda asked two architects to design the dream house of the average Dutch person based on millions of searches on their website. By starting to analyze the data, the real estate process is, as it were, reversed. Furthermore, funda wants to improve the collaboration in the chain by actually building the house and, together with different parties, come to a method for demand-driven development.

Architect Jeroen Atteveld of Heren 5 Architects: “On funda mainly existing houses are listed. Sixty percent of the housing stock in the Netherlands consists of terraced houses, which were built between 1960 and 1985. So that is a residential product that is based on the standard in the past. Nowadays, households are more diverse in composition, there are other forms of cohabitation, and there is more diversity in society. The way of life has become more diverse. Do the existing homes still match the way people want to live now?"

What does the project entail?
Jeroen Atteveld and Dingeman Deijs (Dingeman Deijs Architects) investigated the data and looked at what people are searching for. How many rooms do they want and how many square meters? Atteveld: “That provided a sort of departure point. But in addition to the zeros and ones, we also thought it was important to distil some kind of general image from the data. Our interpretation of that data. And that is that the average Dutch person is looking for a castle - but finds a terraced house. The most clicked houses are villas and castles. That is why we defined the following case for ourselves: how do we turn a castle into a terraced house?

With the design of the funda house, based on funda’s big data, Atteveld and Deijs contributed to the development of a new way of working in the construction chain: demand rather than supply driven

We thoroughly researched how a terraced house is built, and how it functions, and how that works for a castle. That is how we arrived at the concepts of freedom and space. That is why we chose to create a large living space, with double the height and lots of daylight, to enhance the sense of space. We also created unique bedrooms, each with their own qualities. They are smaller than the "standard" bedrooms of about 12 square meters that you will find in most houses, because you actually do not need that space at all. That is why we came up with a tower room, an open-plan attic and a box-bed, among other things.”

What is the contribution from and to the Creative Industries?
With the design of the funda house, based on funda’s big data, Atteveld and Deijs contributed to the development of a new way of working in the construction chain: demand rather than supply driven. Atteveld: “That in itself is not very new to us, because we have always been interested in the residents of the buildings that we design - as logical as that may sound. But we usually use so-called warm data: information we get from conversations with people. The counterpart of this is funda's big data.

But we also went in search of the home feeling of people, their latent desire to live. So, in that regard it is a kind of supplement to the way we work more often. There is no new method overnight, but that was not the intention. The way we have dealt with it is not a blueprint, but rather the start of a search. I see it as a trial and error process. We must properly evaluate and improve this process. Ultimately, with the help of this new method, we want to bend the data from yesterday into the living requirements of tomorrow. So that we can uncover new trends and needs and spatially translate them into new homes and forms of living."

“As architects, we interpret the data in our own way. You could also have a design made based on data only. But people do want to be surprised, they want to see what is possible. We try to capture the dreams of future residents and translate them into contemporary architecture.”

What now?
The funda House is really going to be built, the only question is where. That is why a call has been made to municipalities to register. Discussions are currently ongoing with a number of municipalities. The other houses in the list will also be designed in a demand-driven way. Atteveld: “We are entering a new process where we collect information from potential buyers. We are now working with funda and other platforms to do qualitative research into the housing needs of the Dutchman in a certain region, using online questionnaires and data research. This is not a conventional process to come to a design, but really a search; because how do you translate data into design?"