<b>The increasing pressure on housebuilders to achieve excellence in design has led to more firms turning to architects for help. But how do you find the right one? Housebuilder reports on a new service that solves that problem</b><br><b>The victim of the dip in new home completions has been the national house type. At a recent design seminar supported by the NHBC, a top ten housebuilder illustrated how it had built more than 90% of some 3300 completions from a national range in 2000; but for 2002 it forecast the percentage would be 40%, the balance split between refurbishment and site-specific designs. </b><br><b>Though these figures may be at one extreme, they are representative of a once-in-a-generation shift. Many housebuilders have been responding to changes in the type of sites available through developing new products for a different buyer. More critically for the long established core market of estate-type homes, they have been learning how to respond to the adoption of PPG3, in which local authorities are instructed to block designs planned at less than 12 homes to the acre. So the industry has literally gone back to the drawing board or, in most cases, to the CAD system used by a …