You can't beat Wayne Hemingway when it comes to the marketing opportunity. As the mouthy half of Hemingwaydesign with his designer wife Gerardine, it is he who dashes about the place and is generally in charge of the attitude of the organization. Just as he was in the days when the pair ran the hugely successful Red or Dead fashion label, which they finally sold in 1999, getting rich in the process. And today? We're in Gateshead, on the Tyne, at a former coal depot which is now a Wimpey housing development. As breathed on by the Hemingways.

This is Staiths South Bank, a big project of - eventually - as many as 800 new homes. Wimpey signed up the Hemingways following a typically outspoken article written by Wayne about the "Wimpeyfication and Barratification" of Britain's mass housing. Couldn't we do better than that, he demanded? Couldn't we produce something where the homes had more individuality? To their credit, Wimpey took on the challenge. Go on then sonny, they said. Show us what you can do.

Now, it's show-and-tell time. The 178-home first phase of Staiths South Bank - named after the great timber coal-loading jetties or staiths - still there awaiting restoration is built, people are moving in. Among them the Hemingways themselves. This is suburbia with aspirations. "Can the Red or Dead fashion rebels make Wimpey Homes cool?" we rhetorically asked when we broke the story of their involvement back in 2001.