Wimpey offers the bespoke house

Fancy ordering a bespoke detached home, arranging a mortgage and reaching completion within, say, six weeks? According to George Wimpey, the housebuilder, you will be able to do so soon.

Later this year on two sites in Essex, Wimpey will put up factory-made homes for Guinness Trust, a housing association, which will come with fitted carpets and can be assembled in a couple of days.

Dennis Brant, Wimpey's chief executive, sees the revo lutionary concept being rolled out into the private sector where an increasingly wealthy population is demanding detached homes designed and built to their own specification.

The houses, complete with steel frame to allow maximum loft space, will be assembled in four or five modules which will be delivered to sites where the foundations and pipes and wires have already been laid. They take 4 to 6 weeks to build in the factory compared with 13 weeks for a traditional house.

Unveiling a 33% rise in 1999 pre-tax profits to £112.8m, Mr Brant said the new concept homes could help encourage more young people into the construction industry and promote the "de-skilling and multi-skilling" under way.

A government task force led by Sir John Egan demanded 18 months ago that the industry clean up its act, condemning shoddy profits, filthy sites and downtrodden employees.

By moving the building of homes to modern, air-conditioned factories, Mr Brant said, more young people would be attracted to the industry - and discover that the old craft skills were no longer needed while flexibility reigned supreme.

Mr Brant also disclosed that a growing number of home-buyers are moving online, with Wimpey reporting 750 sales leads a month and a 300% increase in visits to its website in the past year.

The group - which wrote off £4m last September because of accounting irregularities and has seen its shares slide in recent years - said it was on course to beat its targets ahead of schedule. The shares rose 1p to 109p yesterday.