Gabion: The house as trailer: inside Tim Pyne's M-house. 1/5

© Hugh Pearman. First published by Gabion. (Notes for Americans: for "caravan", read "trailer". In Britain, a caravan does not necessarily have to be able to move: it is still, however, seen as legally different from a house. This is as much a matter of semantics as design, which matters in a small country where permanent building is tightly regulated. A Tardis is a fictional time-travelling machine, based on a police box or kiosk, that is small on the outside but infinitely large inside. A lavatory is a john. "Bungalow" derives from a Hindi word, originally meaning a house in the style of Bengal.)

It is a slightly surreal experience. There, on a patch of waste land by a small industrial estate on the outskirts of Canterbury, is the glittering prototype of the much-trailed M-house. A two-bedroom, single-storey house, a modernist bungalow. But on wheels.

It is on wheels because the M-house exploits a loophole in planning laws. It is, officially, a static caravan. Just like all those tinny boxes in windy cheek-by-jowl trailer parks around the coast. They don't move anywhere, of course, once they've arrived. But so long as they have the wheels, so long as they arrive in no more than two big pieces, and so long as they are no more than a certain size, then the normal planning laws for houses do not apply. This being the case, argues architect and exhibition designer Tim Pyne - best known for his extensive and sometimes controversial work in the Millennium Dome - why not design one which meets all those criteria, but is actually a real home rather than a flimsy tin box?