British bungalows have a beige reputation. These single-storey dwellings are often thought of as sturdy and sensible, and are rarely considered to be glamorous or lovely. In 2007, the then Prince Charles called bungalows “homogenised boxes” and accused them of ruining the natural beauty of the Highlands landscape. Yet according to recent reports, the once humble bungalow is now “seriously cool” and in high demand – the average price of a bungalow rose by 17% in the year to May 2023, compared with 13% for houses and 5% for flats. Are people finally starting to fall for their homogenised boxy charms?
I can be rude about bungalows because I live in one, having bought my first house, a bungalow in Warwickshire, two years ago, at the age of 39. I am as surprised as anyone to hear that they’re “seriously cool”, though I have long harboured suspicions that they are far better than their reputation would suggest. Noted enthusiasts before me include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who in 1882 was encouraged to move to one of the first bungalows built in Britain, in the hope that the Kent air might improve his ailing health. He died there. Changing Rooms legend Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen has also gone on record as a fan and previous bungalow owner, writing in the Mail that his was “gloriously pungent with rose-scented associations of suburban bliss”.
To some extent, my own fondness for a bungalow has been informed by a Californian dream that bears little resemblance to my West Midlands reality. Before I moved into the bungalow, I had ideas of modernist, Palm Springs chic, with a muscle car out front and a sandy garden filled with yuccas. The reality is a solid, 60s-built, semi-detached block, with a Peugeot 206 on the drive, and a garden full of hydrangeas; I did try to plant a huge cordyline in the hope that it would resemble a palm tree, but I forgot to fleece it against the cold and it died when the temperature dipped to -10C. Not quite a desert oasis.
A bungalow gives the feel of open-plan living without the impracticality of not being able to close a door when someone has annoyed you. (I still remember, and shudder at the thought of, an old episode of Grand Designs in which a couple turned their entire house into one big wall-less open-plan space.) Perhaps the best thing about bungalow life is that all of my neighbours are retirees and at least 30 years older than me. I occasionally got lucky with wonderful retired neighbours in London and it left me with a lasting theory that in the neighbour lottery, the over-70s are the jackpot. I’m generalising, of course, but in my experience, they have been friendly, community-minded and watch any delivery left on the doorstep like a hawk.
One reason estate agents offer for bungalows’ new popularity is that they tend to have bigger gardens. After two decades of renting in the city and rarely enjoying a scrap of patio, I still can’t quite believe that I have a garden and that it goes back so far. It’s not even considered a big one. As the unofficial self-appointed mortgage advisers of the internet helpfully suggested, all I had to do to afford it was give up flat whites and avocado toast, or, as I like to put it, save up for 10 years then move more than 100 miles away from the friends and the social structures I had built up over the course of my entire adult life. Work harder, snowflakes!
There are plenty of reasons why I like bungalows, then, but I’m not sure that they’ll ever be cool. That label seems to be a shiny sticker over the top of the housing and economic crises, another way of attempting to rebrand the increasing scarcity of affordable housing stock and soaring bills as desirable “downsizing”. More people, from retired couples to families, are looking to bungalows because they tend to be smaller than multi-storey houses, and therefore cheaper to heat and run. A bungalow may be seen as a way to cut energy costs, though it may not cut the mortgage – due to a chronic shortage of supply and increased desirability, bungalows are often more expensive than houses in the same area. For decades now, developers simply haven’t been building them, as they’re not space-efficient; the higher you go, the more rooms you can add. These homogenised boxes, short and stout, do have their charms, but as ever, with housing in the UK, there isn’t enough to go around.
Rebecca Nicholson is a columnist for the Observer and the Guardian
