Property: Whatever happened to the Ideal future? Call them old-fashioned, but Mr and Mrs Public know what they like. David Lawson marvels at the persistence of the 'Tudorbethan' home

Imagine walking down the street in your great-grandparents' clothes, or driving around in a pre-war car. Heads would turn and tongues wag at such eccentricity. Yet build a home as they would have done and no one raises an eyebrow.

'I think it has something to do with the state of the economy,' John Bailey of Custom Homes says. 'When times are hard, people look for statements of tradition and stability. They demand all the modern comforts inside but want a home that looks as if it has been standing for 200 years.'

But it is not that simple. 'Tudorbethan' homes have been the rage for more than a decade, long before the property dream turned sour. We dipped a toe in the future - and didn't like it.

Inside, today's perfect home is all hi- tech kitchens and energy efficiency, but it still has leaded windows, steeply sloping eaves and the almost mandatory half-timbered facade. At least, this is Mr Bailey's latest creation, now going up at Earls Court in London for this year's Ideal Home Exhibition. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the first glimpse of Utopia presented all of 85 years ago when this showpiece of consumerist zeal was launched on an unsuspecting public.

Buried among stalls of stain remover, electric avocado peelers and swish bedroom suites, it will make architects fume and modernists weep. But it seems this is what Mr and Mrs Public would choose if they had the cash to build their own home.

Looking backwards is nothing new. Homes chosen for the first show in 1908 did much the same, the Design Museum has discovered during its research for an exhibition which opens next Tuesday to coincide with the show. In fact, taste has changed little over the centuries. The prize-winning 1908 house - a snip at pounds 1,000 - resembles a stunted classical villa, while the smaller 'cottages' came straight out of Hansel and Gretel.

They were a revolution to Edwardians, however. 'There has been a rebellion against the old type of narrow, inconvenient houses that are to be found in so many suburbs. Considerable difficulty is found in obtaining servants to stay and mistresses suffer in many ways,' says a contemporary newspaper report.

Fewer than one in 10 families owned their homes in those early years, but Lord Northcliffe shrewdly anticipated the property explosion that would transform society - and bring in advertising to his newspapers. He launched a show that would become an institution, providing an annual fashion statement on house design. In those early years it carried historic obsession to the masses, as fake-timbered semis swept outwards to become the building blocks of vast inter-war suburbs.

The future was never ignored. Saskia Partington of the Design Museum points out that designers were always given space to display modern houses. 'After all, it was a commercial event and these would generate business in new materials,' she says.

But the public was rarely impressed with modern structures. New kitchens and bathrooms, with their labour-saving paraphernalia, were popular, but the concrete boxes that offered a new way of living rarely made it out of the exhibition and on to the streets.

There was an intervening period when the big builders erected the pink- brick boxes that came to dominate newer suburbs. In fact, Mr Bailey's first effort for the show in 1970 was a split- level 'colonial' style, complete with shutters and balconies, imported from America.

'That was the top-selling design of the decade,' he says. But the attraction did not last. 'It does not sell at all now,' Mr Bailey says, reinforcing his theory that when hard times loom, we scuttle back to safer symbols. By the Eighties he was back to building Tudorbethan.

Some trend-spotters may prefer not to be reminded of their predictions of life at the end of the century. The Design Museum picks out images from the mid-Fifties which assumed that by 1980 Mr and Mrs Normal would be sitting in a plastic house gazing through transparent walls at their internal garden. Snugly kitted out in knitted nylon suits, they would flip through a 3-D magazine or tuck into gamma-treated food from a table that rose from the floor. Given the development and popularity of shell suits and microwaves, some of this is not so far from the truth.

The 'ideal' home of 1993 does have the predicted colour television, answerphone and microwave oven. It also boasts the latest kitchen appliances, self-cleaning devices and automated lavatory systems (just walk away and it flushes]). But the gizmos seem to play second fiddle to tradition.

'Energy efficiency and economy have started selling homes only in the past five years as buyers become more concerned about costs,' Mr Bailey says. The 1993 house is so well insulated it rates almost a perfect energy-efficiency score, despite the fact that it looks comfortably old.

'If the general public demanded more artistic, pleasant and healthful homes, they would get them. It is amazing to the professional mind how easily people are satisfied and what wretched apologies for houses they are willing to occupy or buy.'

Powerful words - but not from Mr Bailey. They come from a commentator after the first 'ideal' homes were launched all those years ago. Perhaps we have come full circle in more ways than one.

Ideal Homes - 9 March to 22 August. The Design Museum, Butlers Wharf, London SE1 (071-403 6933). Ideal Home Exhibition - 18 March to 12 April, Earls Court, London SW5 (advance booking: 0733 890155).

(Photograph omitted)