LORD ROGERS, the modernist high priest of British architecture who designed the Millennium Dome and the Lloyd’s building in London, is to take on Ikea, the Swedish retailer of flat-pack furniture, in a battle to remodel the British home.

Rogers has designed his first new house for 37 years, to be followed by 145 more on a new Wimpey estate on the edge of Milton Keynes.

His orange, mauve and pink “flexi-house” can be altered to suit changing tastes and space requirements.

Meanwhile Ikea plans to build 500 prefabricated houses, sold from its warehouse-style outlets, costing a maximum of £150,000.

Both schemes are aimed at those left behind by the house-price boom. The government warned last week that unless housebuilding accelerated, the proportion of 30-year-old couples able to afford their own home would fall from 50% today to close to 30% in 20 years’ time.

Those who buy Rogers’s three-bedroom home, estimated at £230,000, will be able to choose different wall finishes, change the interior layout as their family grows and clip on more rooms using a prefabricated system.

Trevor Beattie, southern England director of English Partnerships, the government regeneration quango providing the land, said: “You can begin as a couple with an open-plan ground floor and kitchen and a huge open-plan bedroom covering the first floor. When children come along you can subdivide rooms to create bedrooms and then, when they leave home, you can open it all up again.”

Wimpey and Rogers, 73, appear unlikely collaborators. Rogers has frequently criticised property developers, accusing them of creating “alien lines of . . . doll’s houses”.

Rogers’s house — his first since he built a glass and steel home for his parents in 1969 — will be available in up to a dozen combinations of size and layout.

The showhouse has been completed and work has begun on a full terrace of houses which will go on sale next year.

In Gateshead, 230 miles north, Ikea has submitted a planning application for an estate of BoKlok houses — a timber-framed system imported from Sweden that will sell for a maximum of £150,000 for a three-bed house.

Like the Wimpey scheme, the designs are resolutely modern and together, observers say, the projects add up to an attempt “to change the housing tastes of the entire nation.”

Wayne Hemingway, who designs clothes and houses, said: “To try to move away from pastiche design, which is what most people like, could take 15-20 years. But it’s not going to take a lot of marketing to get a lot of people attracted to the principles behind these houses.”

Rogers’s design contrasts strongly with neighbouring redbrick estates. The half-white, half-mauve panelled exterior is offset by bright orange strips around some of the windows, all of which are double glazed. The pitched roof is pink and there is not a curve in sight.

The architects have even designed the external walls to be unclipped from the frame so that different finishes can be applied. Standard high-density fibre board can be upgraded to terra cotta, reconstituted stone and even slow-growing grass. Some designers, however, have reservations about the design. “People don’t like odd shapes and strange colours,” said Robert Adam, a classical architect favoured by the Prince of Wales.

“If you build something in silly colours you can bet people won’t buy it. The BoKlok houses look really very horrid.

“Architects just can’t resist getting their sticky fingers all over housing and turning it into something radical.”

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