Veda Homes UK - the wellness company that builds homes
In episode 079 of the Green Healthy Places podcast, I am in the UK talking to Dean Jarvis, Founder and CEO of Veda Homes, a residential developer active in the London commuter-belt area with a clear focus on wellness and sustainability. Dean has a background in finance and launched Veda in 2017, setting out on a mission to combine his own journey towards holistic wellbeing with the need for more healthy, green housing stock for families in the UK.
Veda Homes UK
Dean, amazing to have you here. Thanks for joining us on the Green Healthy Places podcast. Why don't we dive in with a quick overview of what you've done so far with the Veda Homes brand?
Dean Jarvis
Veda Homes was founded in 2017 but my own property journey actually started before that. I had a previous incarnation in the City of London and it wasn't working for me health-wise so I started to do some property development as a creative outlet.
Veda was established to marry my experience in property development with my search for wellness and health because.
Healthy housing stock
What we've accomplished fundamentally is to push the envelope on why we live in our homes the way we do, how we can live in our homes better and also how we can build homes better.
We focus on new build residential, we've done some lovely sites and some not so good sites where we've made mistakes but we're growing and we're trying to drive that message forward to be a voice of positive change.
Geographically, we are focused on Surrey and the surrounding home counties. We have a site in Hampshire, another down in Sussex but the London commuter belt is our bread and butter.
We've got around seven sites at the moment and that totals up to about £40-45 million in high quality residential schemes that are all about wellness and sustainability.
matt morley
What I've seen in the market is a values-based approach to residential often been happening at a far larger scale.
So multi-unit residential towers where the developer can apply some of these WELL standard and wellness real estate concepts at scale, then fold in various health and wellness amenities for communal use. The masterplanned residential community has arguably led the way in that sense.
What I found interesting about your work is that you're doing it on a much more intimate and personal scale but still applying those same principles. When you set out to do this, what was the business opportunity or unmet need that you you identified?
Energy efficiency and wellness in housing
Dean Jarvis
If we rewind it wasn't so much me sitting down and saying 'OK how can I create a business that solves a problem completely', the problem had existed long before.
To the outside world I was successful, achieving all this great stuff, chasing imaginary pound notes around on screens but as a human being I was unfulfilled and miserable.
I went to India and bumped into it was an Australian guy who knew everything about an ancient Indian way of building houses that stems from the Vedas, old sanskrit texts about inform us as humans about how we should live in harmony with nature and enhance our wellbeing.
It was like a light bulb moment for me at that point where I'd been searching for a way to get well myself and to continue on my property journey as well.
So yes, you're right, there are a lot of big schemes out there that weave in wellness and that's all well and good, I don't want to knock that because clearly doing something is better than nothing but a lot of the time it's volume house building with a wellness strategy strapped onto the site.
The way we approach it all is in much more of a boutique style whereby absolutely everything we do is bespoke and considered from a framework of sustainability and wellness from day one.
If you look at the big schemes you might say 'they're house builders with a wellness strategy strapped onto the side'. Arguably, we're a 'wellness company with a housing strategy strapped onto the side'.
Green building and healthy building standards
matt morley
I think there is the flip side to larger developers signing up to certification schemes such as WELL for healthy buildings and BREEAM for green buildings in the UK; the risk is that it all ends up becoming vanilla because everybody is chasing the same credits and prerequisites, therefore they end up doing largely similar, formulaic things to achieve them!
The idea of taking a more bespoke, or 'boutique' approach is really interesting and perhaps represents a second wave in this whole process, where people like yourself feel confident enough to not just box check but to create their own interpretation of a green, healthy home.
You work with four pillars in your business, tell us about those?
Veda Homes UK
Good health for families at home
Dean Jarvis
So yeah, we've got four pillars within the business: Veda Development, Veda Rent, Veda Land and Veda Bespoke.
As Veda Development we identify underutilized land first, generally get planning on it ourselves to build the scheme out and then offer it onto the open market for sale; we generally cover the full development process.
Veda Rent is as it says on the tin. We keep a few units or keep the whole scheme depending on cost and how it works and offer that up to the rental market.
Veda Land is working with the landowners, now that sort of goes hand in hand with development because we identify the land, speak to the landowner, negotiate with them, get the planning on it and then it feeds into the development side of the business to build that out and sell it.
Then the bespoke side is fully bespoke. Customized units specifically to an end user's needs.
Wellness and sustainability in family households
matt morley
So there's that final bit around a future resident becoming part of the process in some way. Presumably you've got your fundamentals where you've tried to define the Veda ethos? How much of it is essential or obligatory to what you do versus how much of it is optional according to what each client asks for?
Dean Jarvis
I wouldn't say there's a tick list of essentials because of the way we go about the business and everything being bespoke, that goes for the development side of the business.
As for the rental side of the business, we're not a volume house builder that just has a single house type that we can just rattle off a hundred of the same houses with a predefined metric or design.
So we don't sit down and say here's then things we always do because we find it pigeonholes our thought process or limits what we're able to do because it all depends on the site location, the orientation of the site, the type of scheme you're trying to achieve and so on.
There are so many different moving parameters from us. We want to have the full arsenal of tools at our disposal.
What's critical is to have a highly effective professional team who live and breathe this stuff so that from day one when you sit down as a design team and ask where where we are going with a specific project, everybody's already already thinking about sustainability and wellness.
Building a property for health and wellbeing
matt morley
So it becomes more about putting together a project team based on their individual expertise in the healthy home market, putting health first. So you're selecting architects for example who have already direct exposure to sustainability and know how to design a healthier home.
Dean Jarvis
Absolutely I think that's fundamental because then as I say you can have a fully rounded, holistic approach to what you're doing and it forms the framework for every single decision from day one.
It's the only way to really walk the walk. Otherwise what you're trying to do is grab a strategy that's been formulated offsite as a generic response to market conditions, and it means that the end product is not actually functioning as well as it should do.
matt morley
You mentioned the wellness aspect then, so for someone who's less familiar with the idea of how we integrate health and wellness strategies into a home of this scale, what sort of things are you playing with here in your mission to deliver healthy homes?
Homeowners and high levels of wellbeing
Dean Jarvis
It really starts before we've even put pen to paper on what we're going to do, so you need to get down to the proposed site if you haven't got planning yet, track the sun's path across the site look at the natural features that are there and start to think about the natural environment and how you can position a building to leverage all these natural features.
Natural light and daylight exposure
Most people are pretty comfortable now with the fact that we need natural light to stimulate serotonin and Vitamin D, most people are pretty comfortable with the idea that we need to de-stress so want dedicated areas for quiet retreat, ideally connected to nature.
Then that naturally feeds into starting to configure an internal layout. We think about what rooms need sunlight at certain times a day to improve circadian rhythm.
We consider the sighting of each room along with ventilation and obviously how that internal space functions, the size of the windows again that feeds back into Vitamin D and the location of the windows, also what internally the sunlight falls on because if you think about the path of the sun throughout the day and the way the sunlight shines through the windows. What does that fall on internally in the building, in an ideal situation?
Biophilia
Of course lots of greenery and natural features outside. Most people can get their head around the fact that we need time and space in nature to help our cognitive function.
We aim to orient the master bedroom to face the sunrise rather than the sunset because it means you wake up your cognitive function increase you go about your day more productive as opposed to being flooded with sunlight when you're trying to get some restful sleep.
We literally bring the outdoors in with our planting, we're building a scheme at the moment where three houses have fig trees in the middle, partly to help purify the air but also brings biophilia inside. you know the nature inside to help with cognitive and function and all that kind of lovely stuff.
Acoustics
We're thinking about how to reduce vibration, reduce sound travel within the building. We actually specify our own timber frame spec to reduce all that.
Non-toxic healthy interiors
We're creating low toxicity environments by reducing VOCs in our building materials, using natural materials as well to leverage that connection with nature.
Indoor Air Quality (IAQ)
We're big on indoor air quality, so we use indoor air filtration systems in every house and in fact, even before we start designing the propertie.
We do a desktop study on the air quality in the area so we know what we've got to deal with um and and obviously for some reason it looks particularly bad, we know we've got to dial up significantly on the tech to clean the air.
Customer types for healthy homes
matt morley
So in terms of the type of customer or client that you're attracting. Would you say there is a clear sway towards a certain demographic or psychographic? Are these people who are particularly dialed in to all of these healthy home concepts already?
Dean Jarvis
I've never had bad feedback but honestly the demographic is quite wide, we generally have to educate people on the benefits of a healthy home ourselves. I don't think education around this sort of stuff is necessarily as widespread as we might imagine from inside the sector.
What we find is that we have customers coming to us who have seen our product or been recommended to us but they don't really understand the wellness bit fully yet.
Wellbeing solutions in the home
matt morley
Do you think that's all to do with the market, is it perhaps the type of marketing that you're doing at the moment?
DeanJarvis
Yeah we want to formulate a new marketing strategy to really go heavy on it. In the UK there's significant housing pressures and for a lot of people wellness is just not on the agenda.
If you've got a growing family and you need an extra bedroom because you've got a baby on the way you're looking for a house with the right number of bedrooms first and foremost, the indoor air quality is a secondary consideration.
So that has forced us into dealing with the higher end of the market where there's potentially a bit more cash to spend on the luxury stuff.
This business is not about just providing wellness to those who can pay for it but naturally with those market pressures, there's still that zone in which people just can't afford to spend money on some of the wellness features and sustainability. In the long term I would love to do some social housing stuff.
matt morley
Often social housing is where there are the most serious problems unfortunately, particularly around material choices on exterior cladding and interior fit out, from paints to insulation.
What about your business structure right now, how have you built a team to match these market conditions?
Dean Jarvis
I built it purposely lean because we've had non-stop delays with planning and actually more recently some site acquisition stuff too. It seems the world has gone a bit mad post-Covid and it's very hard to get projects through planning.
So we currently have five of them are in planning and have been there quite some time, which means I need a lean structure with minimal overheads, this enables us to weather the storm and be nimble.
Then we use a number of external consultants chosen specifically for their expertise in low-carbon structures or wellness, healthy homes and so on. Everyone understands the product and everyone's pulling in the same direction.
I quite like dealing with outside consultants who have made it their mission to dial up the sustainability and wellness side of real estate and residential housing, they're self-starters, they're like me and you. They're people who genuinely have a passion for it rather than me going out and offering a job to somebody who has applied randomly for the job.
matt morley
In terms of building out the Veda Homes brand from here, how do you see it evolving over coming years?
Dean Jarvis
First and foremost, simply more of what we're already doing. I want to push into the middle market and also the social housing market, so we're delivering across a broad spectrum over the next five to ten years.
We're also going to move into the leisure sector, we're working on a site down in the New Forest at the moment which has been again a bit of a long one, really dialing up the Veda principles on wellness nature, sort of an outdoor hotel wellness facility.
matt morley
Very cool. Well it'll be fascinating to see how it all develops over the next few years, congrats on what you've achieved so far. It's no easy task especially given how the market's been over the last few years but you've you've weathered the storm and seem to have come through guns blazing.
How can people follow along what platforms are you most active on social media?