The couple founded the Red or Dead label, and sold up at exactly the right time in the mid 1990s, since when they have diversified their business into areas well outside fashion. Gerardine quietly gets on with designing, while the outspoken Wayne has gained a high media profile. Between them they now design everything from top-end kitchen appliances to complete interiors, such as the Institute of Directors’ hip new business centre in Pall Mall. He is a familiar face on television - and one of the few products of the fashion world able to hold his own intellectually on the BBC’s testing political discussion programme, Question Time, while simultaneously being a design pundit on The Big Breakfast. So the last time he sounded off in print about the lack of vision in new housing, there was a reaction. He received a call from Wimpey Homes. All right, said Wimpey, we think you might have a point. How about designing us some urban loft apartments?

They refused. They weren’t interested in doing more trendy interiors. He and Gerardine, northerners both and with three children of their own, wanted to tackle the nitty gritty of mass-market family housing as it happens out there in the country. Wimpey - which itself had clearly been coming to the conclusion that it was high time it got itself a new design attitude - stuck with him. The upshot was that the Hemingways have got to work on the Staiths development - 688 homes in one of the cheapest housing areas in the country. The first Hemingway-designed phase of 160 homes is about to be submitted to the local planners.

This is not some suburban greenfield site, but a Government-approved “brownfield” one - in fact the location of Gateshead’s Garden Festival years ago. Previously a steelworks and coal depot, it sits next to a dock and some imposing preserved coal unloading piers - the Staiths of the development’s name - worthy of the classic Michael Caine Tyneside gangster film “Get Carter”. All this is just a brisk walk from the rapidly-regenerating cultural district of the Gateshead quayside with its new opening bridge, Baltic art gallery and - soon - concert hall, just across the river from traditionally snootier Newcastle. So Wimpey is taking a multiple gamble: that its homes can revitalize the area, benefit from the growing “Gateshead effect” and attract the housebuying public to the unconventional vision of the Hemingways.

These are not the hated “executive homes”, though they have perceptibly shifted upmarket since the Hemingways have been involved. The original idea was to achieve a price range of between £55,000 and £100,000. Now, Wimpey is talking about a range of £65,000 to £175,000, for a mix of mostly family homes - around two-thirds apartments and one-third houses, from one to four bedrooms. That is fairly ambitious for the area, though scarcely outrageous in national terms. So the scheme, to sell, has to be distinctly different. The Hemingways want people not just to buy homes, but to buy into a complete ethos. And the heart of that ethos is individuality and convivial public space.

“We’ve got loads of friends who, like us, have reached 40 and have two or three kids,” says Wayne. “They often enjoy their homes for the interior, but not the experience of the outside. So we started thinking about what made places good to be in for children. Me and Gerardine both had really happy childhoods, and we realized that much of that was about being able to play outside. But that playing-out thing has long gone.”