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the style factor

the vicissitudes of the planning department of argyll & bute council are plain to see for all, in the manner they appear to be shuffling the environment in which yours truly has opted to live. only a few leaps and bounds from the croft is a house which has been under construction for longer than i can truthfully recall, and the design of which bears no resemblance whatsoever to the buildings which surround it. on the right are two single-storey, traditional cottages, while on the opposite side is an unoccupied two-storey house, long since vacant and owned by bowmore distillery. its design is what might also be referred to as traditional and its dowdy whitewashed exterior a commonality across the hebrides.

the house to which i refer is reputedly of modern design, with the roof higher on one side than the other and with large windows seemingly randomly placed about its person. what is not visible on its contemporaneity is any sign of chimneys. granted, it appears that the house will feature all-electric heating, but the two, semi-detached cottages built across the road within the last decade, were required to fit 'dummy chimneys, reputedly to fit in with the surrounding houses. four houses built within sight of the croft were also excluded from such a demand, despite every single proximitous house featuring one chimney per residence.

it seems the imposition of standards is akin to a moving target.

and when en-route to debbie's in bruichladdich, but only a kilometre or two from bridgend village, again under construction is a very large house resembling little more than a sports pavilion, featuring floor to ceiling windows overlooking the head of the loch. while its modeernity is completely out of keeping with traditional hebridean tradition, that particular aspect is made determinedly worse by its siting adjacent to an elderly, traditional house and conjoined quaint cottage, with tiny, trellised windows. the contrast can only be described as stark, and many have questioned the sanity of the region's planning department in allowing this to pass the planning application.

depending on your architectural point of view, islay's original hebridean housing embodies a remarkably pleasing aesthetic, one that is peppered all across the island. but this aesthetic is being seriously challenged by an ever-increasing preponderance of new-build kit houses, many raised at the behest of wealthy retirees, but clearly designed on a purely functional and economic basis. the majority of these demonstrate remarkably little in the way of traditional design, and there is clearly no intent on the part of the council planning department to retain any of islay's heritage, though i, and others, are at a loss to explain why.

to an extent, it is perhaps a tad unfair to single out the local planning department, for the majority of 21st century innovation seems less than concerned with adopting most (or any) of the 20th century's best practice. bicycles pretty much all look identical these days, aside from the colours and name on the downtube. likewise the motor car, which bears a verisimilitude with that of the cycle industry by making its vehicles all but indistinguishable from each other. even with the addition of electrons.

i am not a motor engineer, nor, come to that, a cycle engineer. therefore i am not fully aprised of the plusses and minuses applicable to the design of either. but i cannot be the only one to have noted that the majority of electric cars resemble nothing more than their internal combustion bedfellows but with panels blanking out the radiator grills. is it not possible that the electric motors could be made to occupy less boxy surroundings? likewise the e-bike, the vast majority of which are not only as dull as dishwater from a design point of view, but almost invariably appear to be painted with varying shades of mud.

is not this the century in which we were due to be approaching the era of the jetsons, when we ought to be living in the jet age, with all that this was once forecast to entail? should it not be that the manufacturers of e-bikes, many of whom are not hidebound by any connection to velocipedinal tradition, provide us with futuristic design, employing swoopy curves rather than the rudimentary box shapes with which we have been served? after all, the raleigh chopper originated in 1968 and the to-die-for colnago arabesque surfaced in 1984. compare that with the just-released gazelle avignon e-bike.

need i say more?

wednesday 15 october 2025