Jerbourg house builds the case for modular construction

The private home was erected in just 10 days, after being shipped to the island from Germany.

The seven-bed, four-storey New England maritime-style villa is the new home of Jon and Pauline Moulton.

Mr Moulton, the well-known local resident venture capitalist and co-founder of the think tank Gpeg, hopes to move into the property in July.

‘And I am confident of doing that as everything so far has stuck to a very tight timetable,’ he said. ‘It’s clearly a solution to some of our building issues as you need much less expertise on shore and you could build this way at almost any site on the island. If it is quicker, cheaper and of high quality, why wouldn’t you build this way?’

Mr Moulton said that the build had worked out about 30% cheaper than building from scratch.

‘And that includes all the shipping costs and everything done to a very high standard,’ he said. ‘We have had four people thinking of building a property themselves who have already come to have a look around.’

He added that this type of building was not just for luxury homes.

‘Importing 100 affordable homes in this way could be an answer to the island’s housing crisis. Prefab does not mean cheap and nasty. Although this building is a one-off design, the company do build off-the-shelf three and four-bedroom homes.’

The house is being built by Baufritz, a company with more than 100 years’ experience of building prefab houses and a reputation for environmentally friendly building techniques.

The company has built about 100 homes in the UK and three in Jersey, but this is its first in Guernsey.

And Mr and Mrs Moulton have also travelled to Germany to visit the factory in Erkheim twice.

‘They insist upon it, they want you there to look at materials and finishes,’ he said.

‘It’s very impressive, they go from plan to cutting wall panels out without a human being involved, it’s all measured by computer to incredibly tight tolerances of just a few millimetres.’

Mr and Mrs Moulton bought the site, which contained a previously listed art deco house, for £4.8m. in October 2021.

The house had been empty since 2017, when after a three-year battle with planning, it had been deemed to be structurally unsound and uninhabitable.

Three staff from the German company have been finishing off the internal decoration, alongside local contractors.

‘It’s slightly ironic that this was once the German naval headquarters and it is a German company now rebuilding it,’ he said.

‘I know some of the staff have taken the time to look at some of the wartime structures here and were impressed with how well they had stood the test of time.’

The build started in earnest late last year with foundations taking around three months to be completed.

The wall sections of the building were then shipped to the island on standard freight sailings with the exterior walls already painted and all the plumbing and electrics pre-installed.

‘The roof piece was probably the biggest and seeing that put into place was very impressive,’ said Mr Moulton.

‘There has only been one error in the whole construction, and that was the placement of a window that was easily rectified.’