Guy Harris from AccessiblePRS explains why accessible housing is important, what the key considerations are and how to deliver it well. He also shares his experience of designing his own house as a wheelchair user.
Interview with Guy Harris
Guy Harris is the Director of AccessiblePRS, which he founded in 2020 to increase the supply of wheelchair accessible rental homes. He became a wheelchair user in 2003 after an accident and now works to promote good accessible design for all buildings.
Accessibility is the ability to move around a home at all stages of life
Quite often the terms accessibility and adaptability are used interchangeably, and people will even have their own understanding of what they mean. So Guy defines accessibility as the flow and space of a home, and the ability to move around it at all stages of life. This can be as parents with young kids, older people, wheelchair users, people who have dementia, and so on. Accessibility is understanding how we relate to our spaces and making them human centred.
Accessible spaces can benefit everyone
Guy believes that making accessibility about the person with a disability is fundamentally flawed, because it means we bring all our negative stereotypes and misconceptions to that approach. Instead of being a burden this can be playful, glorious or liberating for a whole range of people.
“When I tell stories about where accessibility is in place, very often, I tell them about people who have no disability at all, and show them the advantages, so that we can understand that this really is not for some people, this is for all people.”
Wheelchair users face constant frustrations from existing properties
In 2003 Guy made a mistake when crossing the road and was struck by a lorry. From that point he became a wheelchair user.
Like his, most disabilities are acquired and this made him realise that he had been part of the problem before his injury. He worked on property projects, and it was only after the accident that he understood the constant frustrations for wheelchair users around property, which also gave him an insight to the opportunities.
Funnily enough, before his accident, Guy had bought a 1000 square feet shell apartment in London, which he made into an aspirational and indulgent space. It was only afterwards that he realised he’d actually designed a wheelchair accessible space. However, he admits he wasn’t in the wheelchair accessible mindset at the time. The Disability Discrimination Act had just come in, which meant that sockets and switches had to be at a specific height. He remembers clearly saying, “I don’t have a disability, I don’t want them at this height, I’m not doing it.” He sees a nice juxtaposition there, both wilfully not wanting to do anything around disability, whilst on the other hand designing the perfect space for it.
Building for accessibility requires a mindset shift
While we have made significant advances in gender equality, eliminating racial discrimination, and LGBTQ+ rights, Guys says that disability feels like the poor cousin.
Until we get over our subconscious fear around what it means, what it looks like, and not wanting to believe that it can ever happen to us, we’re always going to have an issue with the idea of building accessibly.
Guy feels we either need to change our relationship with disability, or perhaps with the language around accessibility. Accessibility is simply good design.
No one will come into this home and go, “Wow look at that accessibility.” It really features disability in a wonderful way. You come in and you go, “Hey, wow, look at this home.”
Key requirements for wheelchair users are more space, a level home, step-free access and a purpose designed bathroom
As a wheelchair user Guy needs things to be designed in a certain way to be able to live autonomously and independently. He needs a bit of space, wider doors and consideration of how they’re positioned relative to things that come next to them, whether it’s cupboards or walls. Step-free access is also important, which might include lifts or ramps. Bathrooms are a critical room, often a wet room, and a hoist may be needed.
By designing for a wheelchair user, you design for any eventuality in life.
You don’t need a specialist architect for a house build
Guy’s architect wasn’t a specialist in disability or accessibility but was amazing. He drew the brief out of them carefully, in the same way that he would for any other client, considering how they lived and wanted to live.
One aspect that really helped Guy was a study trip, visiting existing properties and trying to absorb useful information.
“People make decisions without actually seeing what they’re making decisions on, which is nuts, frankly. And so the more we got to see different things and understand the implications and the benefits and the costs, the more we naturally arrived at the decisions we made.”
There will be opportunities in the design process
The design process didn’t revolve around the wheelchair, but as they went along, they realised that there were opportunities coming from their discussions. For example, the spine wall down the middle of the property, has quite a few structural posts. These created alcoves and space to put furniture, but also were the perfect place for handholds.
The house evolved into an ecological build through the design process
Guy explains that they were starting with a blank sheet and ecological architecture or doing something green, was an obvious question to ask, although at that point he really didn’t know what it meant. He did some investigating but wasn’t getting anywhere until he heard a sustainability consultant talk at a show and he’d never heard anyone speak so much common sense about how to build. She then recommended the architect, who he eventually hired.
“We arrived at straw, having said the only thing I know I don’t want is straw!”
After two separate non tangible experiences they decided to build with straw. The first happened in Scotland when they visited a straw bale building. It was blowing a hoolie outside and because Guy is paralysed, he doesn’t feel his legs, but his legs started to tingle in a warm, cosy, enjoyable way. They then went to the property next door, which was a different build and a nice layout, but it just felt cold, without the same richness.
This prompted them to visit another straw build, Haringey Community Centre in London. At the time Guy’s wife was pregnant and wasn’t really enjoying the pregnancy, nausea, low blood pressure, always moving from side to side. But inside the centre he noticed she was standing still and looked comfortable. As soon as they went back outside the nausea started again, but when they came back inside it stopped. There was no way of understanding what it was, but on two separate occasions they had both experienced this magical feeling, and so it became a no-brainer to build with straw.
Accessible homes don’t have to be ‘Grand Designs’ projects
Guy is aware that his bespoke home might be considered a grand design style building, but accessibility can be achieved at most scales.
Aspects Guy particularly enjoys is the volume of the internal space and how light is brought into the property from all directions. There’s a strong connection to the wooded area outside.
Their choice bio-based materials has delivered on many levels
Guy’s home is a load-bearing straw bale house, with bales almost being used like bricks. On the inside natural clay plaster is applied directly to the straw, whilst the outside is lime render.
The house has an organic, natural feel whilst still being mainly straight lines with a few nice curves and subtle colours. For Guy the house feels grounded and is peaceful and calm inside. The design is largely open plan, which allows them to be doing things together in the same space, but also when doing things separately they somehow still feel connected.
“I think one of the subtle things about the house is how when you’re in it, everything feels right.“
Look at the value of what you build rather than the cost
Guy wishes there was more consideration around value rather than looking purely at cost. Building the cheapest possible home is unlikely to deliver a good outcome. As someone who works in property, Guy understands that the budget could be spent in a million different ways. For example, they could have had more space for the money or built more quickly, or spent less, but that was not the priority.
The materials they were using and how they were building was important, and he was taking a long-term view. Guy intends to stay in this house for the rest of his life, so the initial cost will balance out over that time. This is a quality-of-life investment.
An accessible entrance
Make sure you get good advice when building for accessibility
Building and designing homes is an expensive business and it’s easy to make mistakes around accessibility, so Guy suggests getting external input when required.
“If you want to design for more possibilities, take advice. If you want to, I don’t know, have specific sound or acoustic attributes or engineering attributes, you pay for advice.”
He shares a couple of examples of how planning upfront can help you avoid problems further down the line.
He stresses that it is important to consider how the walls, doors and windows relate to each other. How you create the ratios and the space, your floor surfaces and the furniture that you need. Bathrooms are an expensive room that need designing properly, because retrofitting a standard bathroom to accommodate grab rails or a ceiling track hoist, could mean starting again from scratch.
Another scenario is with sliding patio doors, which may not open all the way, meaning the opening is then less than a wheelchair width. Or you put a ramp in but have forgotten that you need a level platform on both sides. These are simple things, but they matter and so paying for advice could help prevent costly mistakes.
“In every design meeting, just ask the questions, what can I do? What if? What does it look like? What does that mean? Have we thought about? Do you know about? And take it from there, because even the simplest of questions will inform the design and make people think.”
The regulations are helpful but provide minimum standards
Guy says that, for the most part, the regulations are extremely helpful. However they are open to interpretation and deal with minimum standards. If you have a designer who doesn’t understand the intention behind the regulations, they can interpret them, sometimes in bizarre ways which mean the regulations have been met but are meaningless. And for Guy when we aim for minimum standards, we nearly always fail. Good design is about understanding what is actually needed and designing for that. If you go for best practice, then the regulations are almost guidelines. Experience and advice will steer you much further.
There is a National Register of Accessibility Consultants, NRAC, and those are people who have experience of designing for accessibility. A consultant can come in at the beginning, at the design phase, be part of those conversations and reviews, and support your architect in optimising the design.
We should be designing for an ageing population
By 2040 there’ll be more people in the UK aged 65 or over than there will be of working age, which for Guy, begs two questions. One, where are they going to live? And two, who’s going to look after them? The only feasible answer at the moment is an end-of-life residential care setting, which he thinks is going to be quite grisly for a lot of people.
It’s already common to find that newly injured people with disabilities get stuck in hospital, because there’s no accessible accommodation available.
So if you have the opportunity to create your own home, it’s a good idea to consider future needs. Otherwise you may face a situation, an illness or a disability, and you won’t be able to cope and you’ll be forced to move out.
Communities should be able to house us all
Guy feels that in the UK we put accessibility in a silo like all the other housing issues, such as affordable homes and green homes, whereas accessibility could cut across all the silos. He suggests every design meeting should ask questions around accessibility to inform the design and make people think.
He gives an example where his architect was working on a community project in Scotland, designing holiday lets in a woodland setting. Initially they were not thinking about accessibility, but when they embraced it several things happened.
The first thing they realised was that by designing the bathroom for accessibility it helped with the modular design and made things flow. The second thing was by making the route from the car park to the homes suitable for wheelchairs they could get a small telehandler to the construction area. This saved time and money when moving materials and the process went more smoothly. The third thing was the community realised that if any of them had an accident or got injured and needed accessible accommodation they would now be able to stay in the community rather than having to move out.
For Guy this is an important point to highlight. Traditionally we’ve always included everyone in a community. We really need to get back to that understanding of what community means.
“One of the things I love to do is show beautiful, accessible design, because I think that’s where people suddenly start to get it and realise that it’s not clinical, institutional, ugly, it’s actually something that nourishes and enhances our lives.”
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