Wayne meets me at Newcastle Airport and as we drive in, he explains the rationale. "When we got this house, we thought we'd show them how you could do it, using affordable things," he says. "How you could fit it out with stuff from B&Q's cheapest ranges, for instance." Though he is equally keen on the stuff he has sourced from local branches of Marks and Spencer (the doomed prototype Lifestore), John Lewis, and the sparky northern chain of department stores Barker and Stonehouse.
Wayne's personal style is charity-shop chic. He is a collector of classy tat and low-cost refinement alike. His high-energy jackdaw tendencies are balanced by the careful and precise pencil of Gerardine. She, as he will always tell you, is the one who sits down and does the designing. Not being architects, they worked with a husband-and-wife architect couple they soon became friends with: Mark and Jane Massey of the Ian Darby Partnership. But for their own home there, the Hemingways are in total charge.
"There were two reasons we did this," says Wayne. "First, it's a real benefit, when you're doing a project like this, to have something that you've designed and to live in it while we're up here. We're here about three days a fortnight, and there's four years to go. So we'll get to know the neighbours, learn about the upsides and the downsides of the place. And second, we're on a mission to show Wimpey what you can do with the insides of their homes. Because we know we've attracted quite a different clientele for them here. It's not their standard houses, and it's not their usual housebuyers. Often quite young. The kind of person who might well have bought an apartment in the past but now actually wants a garden."
Wayne walks me round the place, then takes me to a truly ghastly new estate up on the hill close by to show what the standard mass-developer product (by a rival volume housebuilder, offered at similar prices) is. The comparison is telling. Rows of dumb, identical housing blocks that somehow manage to block out one of the best views in the country, up and down the river. Staiths is head and shoulders above that.
But don't run away with the idea that this is some kind of New Jerusalem. Far from it. It is simply a well-landscaped, relatively low-density suburban development with a more varied range of house types than usual, finished in a range of different materials including timber, brick, coloured render and Scandinavian tiling (in fact, there's something of a Scandinavian feel about the whole place). This variety, along with the slightly whimsical way individual house types have been mixed up, means that the short terraces of houses do not look at all uniform.
