With some modern design concepts (e.g. leaving plenty of plenum for unanticipated future cabling/plumbing needs) I think you could come up with a very pleasant place to live, just at probably quadruple the price.
Is anyone building stuff like this today? Or would this have to be some extremely custom stuff you need to research and act as a contractor managing a bunch of subcontractors?
> Is anyone building stuff like this today?
can it even be done while satisfying modern building codes and energy efficiency requirements?
They are built all of the time. Invest in good windows, metal roof, and good drainage and the house will be around 200 years from now.
The farmers I worked for as a teenager revovated their Dutch built barn (ca. 1660) into a home. The secret is keeping the water out.
Nearly every one of these criticisms is a desirable feature of traditional Japanese architecture. Houses are assembled from standardized materials produced off-site and fitted together without nails (wood joinery). Many interior walls and some exterior walls are literally made of paper, in sliding wooden frames (exterior shoji almost always have sliding wooden covers that are deployed at night). Special attention is paid to the thatched or tiled roof.
Japan is a very wet place. In summer there are typhoons at least every week and it's miserably hot and humid. Traditional houses are perfectly adapted for this: when you need to you can slide open most of the walls and take advantage of every breeze. I believe that most of the wood is cedar, which is resistant to rot, and most of the structure is left visible (i.e. no plaster) so any problems are readily apparent.
Houses seem less adapted to winter, but people adapt by using deep baths, kotatsu, and quilted clothing to heat their bodies rather than the entire inside of the house.
Earthquakes are pretty common in Japan, one of the reason lighter materials are used. Traditional buildings are typically built on stone foundations. Structural posts are fitted with stone "feet" that are free to slide around on the foundation during earthquakes.
Japanese don't value permanence in architecture the way Europeans do -- even the Ise Jungu (shrine), a national monument, is rebuilt every N years -- yet in the area I lived (Nara prefecture) there were many traditional houses over a hundred years old. There is at least one wooden building at Horyuji (temple) that is ~1200 years old.
[Thanks to Dr. Lloyd Fulton for that class in traditional Japanese architecture at Waseda U. Miss you, sensei.]
That may be a big part of the explanation. It's fairly common for Japanese people to have the existing house torn down and rebuilt when they buy a property.
More importantly, when you speak about these throwable houses, are you sure that is a "desirable feature"?
It might be that the UK has more than its fair share of cowboy builders. It is not the building technique that is at fault but the execution of it.