We’re sorry to inform you that there is one little catch to Home Sweet Home, the interactive art installation coming to the Cultch next week. Yes, as promised, the Cultch is handing out starter-home kits, free for the asking, to all and sundry. And, yes, you’re welcome to customize your domicile any way you see fit. But if you’re thinking that your East Van dream home is no more than a Number 20 bus ride away, remember this: beautiful though your new house might be, next to it a shoebox might seem roomy. It’s going to be fun to build, nonetheless.

Home Sweet Home is the brainchild of the Subject to_change company’s Abigail Conway and Lucy Hayhoe, two U.K.–based artists who thought up this whimsical housing scheme while students at London’s Goldsmiths University. It’s part interactive theatre, part social network, and part hobby hour: the idea is that participants build their ideal community out of paper, fabric, glitter, and glue—and in the process learn something about how they live, and how they want to live.

“When we started this project,” says Hayhoe, reached at home in London, “we imagined it as this weird utopian paradise. It was all about celebrating that everyone can be creative, and that anyone can be an artist, loosely speaking. And I guess that kind of politics is still there. It’s about celebrating an individual contribution, as well as a sort of collective identity.”

Your contribution, should you choose to take part, will be to build and decorate a scale model of your ideal home. After that, it’s up to you how deeply you get involved in your community’s weeklong existence, meant to mark Vancouver’s 125th anniversary celebrations. (The site is open from Monday to Friday from 1 to 8 p.m. and Saturday from 12 to 6 p.m.)

“When you arrive at the Cultch, you’ll be greeted by an estate agent,” says Hayhoe, using the English term for “realtor”. “We’ll set up this little shoplike booth, and you’ll meet a couple of estate agents, and they’ll guide you through the experience of buying your house. Well, not buying it—the houses are free—but they’ll talk you through the options, which are different designs, and they’ll talk you through where you’d like to live in the community. You’ll look at the map and it might be really important to you that you live by a bar. Or maybe you’d want to live somewhere more rural, perhaps with a little more space. You’ll kind of be given those options.”

Then you’ll find your building site, laid out on an enormous canvas map, unpack your house kit, and get to work. What makes the project more than Craft Day at the Cultch, however, is that Hayhoe and Conway have incorporated several different media into their creation. There’s a radio station, a bulletin board, and a postal service; participants are encouraged to interact with each other and develop, collectively, a kind of script around their model community.

The results, explains Hayhoe, can be surprising—especially if not everyone wants to play nice.

“Some people just like to cast themselves as the villain,” she says, laughing. “They like to be troublemakers. So it’s quite interesting, seeing how different people choose the areas that they want to interact with.”

In one previous installation, at a U.K. school, a chocolate flood from an ill-run candy factory threatened student digs. In another, renegade neighbours set up a whaling operation and, much to the disgust of some participants, opened a store selling whale meat. Recently, in Los Angeles, an environmental theme developed, as Hayhoe explains.

“It was not long after the [Gulf of Mexico] oil spill, and someone erected a BP oil rig, which then had a malfunction and created this oil slick on the beach,” she says. “So we had a town council meeting one night after the show was closed to discuss the issues. We discussed the presence of BP in the town—you know, did they want the oil rig? Which raised all these questions about ”˜Well, there’s been an environmental disaster, but if we get rid of the oil rig that means many people in town won’t have a job anymore.’

“It’s all done with a sense of humour,” she adds, “but there are definitely reflections of reality that do kind of pop up.”

Gentrification, housing prices, and the social cost of the war on drugs are just a few of the realities that will likely emerge during Home Sweet Home’s run at the Cultch, but Hayhoe stresses that if they do, they’ll be suggested by the participants, rather than by the facilitators.

“It’s something that we’ve learned to have faith in, that these stories kind of do develop,” she notes. And they’re not all negative, either.

“Most adults just make quite a nice house,” Hayhoe says. “They’ll maybe make little curtains for the windows, and quite often they make little pets for outside. It’s quite funny how many people just want a nice, simple, little house—which is fair enough. That’s what we all want, isn’t it?”

Home Sweet Home runs at the Cultch from Monday to Saturday (June 6 to 11).