The Next Thing In Houses
By Brooks Jordan | September 3, 2007
If you read Dwell you know they’ve been a key player in the prefab construction movement. Prefab homes are built in modular pieces in a factory and then shipped to the construction site. For many years prefab has been associated with low-quality construction, trailer-home-level kind of stuff.
But in the last five years or so there’s been a big shift because there’s a real need, a market, in which medium-income people and up want good (even great) design in their house, particularly as available land dwindles in the cities and lot sizes generally become smaller. But they can’t pay the premiums to have an architect start from scratch and for the builder to make sure those plans manifest into a house.
Dwell, in 2001 or 2002, and I’m not sure of this was intentional or they just fell into it, started to facilitate the “conversation” buyers, architects, builders, and manufacturers wanted to have about prefab. And in 2007, it’s getting to be a pretty rich conversation. Check out one of the prefab homes that Dwell has been highlighting lately as a co-sponsor. It’s called the Next House (click on the thumbnails to see sets of pictures from a recent open house).
So, what does it cost? I wish that was highlighted on the architect/builder’s wiki page. If I spot it, I’ll update this post with it. And you can see the whole project, other houses under construction, and so forth on the wiki here.
Update: Well, I got a great education about how much a modern prefab home currently costs from the comments to this post. Many of the comments are from people looking seriously at or already creating this type of house. Looks like there’s a way to go to make the houses truly affordable (e.g., $150-$250 sq ft.), but obviously there’s a lot of passion to do just that. Some are willing to go for it and be test cases for the rest of us. I think within five years we’re going to get there.