We Don’t Make a Commodity

By Sarah Mathieson, Managing Director

Conversations are one of the best parts of this job.

This week we hosted Iain Macdonald, Director of the TallWood Design Institute, and Professor Lech Muszynski of Oregon State University’s Department of Wood Science and Engineering. They were visiting from Oregon as part of a learning journey, and as part of Lech’s research mapping timber and modular housing businesses around the world. Fleming Homes was fortunate to be one of their stops.

The One Idea We Kept Circling

It was striking how our conversation kept returning to a single idea, and it’s the one I’ve thought about most since: we don’t make a commodity.

A bespoke home isn’t a unit you can stamp out through standardisation and then compete on price. Every project is designed around an individual family, a particular plot, and a specific budget. And once your product stops being interchangeable, almost everything about how you run the company has to change.

What Changes When Nothing Is Interchangeable

We can’t simply chase volume to fill the factory. Instead, we build in the flexibility to absorb demand at the point it’s genuinely ready: when planning permission comes through, when a mortgage decision is made, and when life finally clears the way for a project to begin.

So we don’t hold stock. We hold relationships. Relationships with the self-builders we guide through the process, with the architects and engineers we collaborate with, with our own designers who draw with the timber frame structure in mind from the very first sketch, and with the erection crews we’ve worked alongside for decades.

We’re not chasing one giant, single-customer order, either. We celebrate a healthy spread of varied projects: large and small, private and commercial, ambitious and modestly simple. That mix is what keeps us resilient.

The Difference Between a Product and a Home

For me, this is the real difference between manufacturing a product and making something genuinely bespoke at scale. After 40 years, it’s something we’re proud of.

But the part that matters most isn’t our pride. It’s what that flexibility makes possible for the people we work with: the freedom to build a home that is honestly, specifically theirs, shaped around their plot, their budget, and the way they actually want to live.

A huge thank you to Iain and Lech for the visit, and for the questions that made us think harder about what we do. Thanks, too, to Robert Hairstans for the introduction. We look forward to continuing the conversation, and to hearing more about the timber hub nurturing startups over in Oregon.

Thinking about building a home of your own?

Our designers would be glad to talk it through with you. Start a conversation with our team.