Nine Cool Manufactured Houses
stylecrave.com
stylecrave.com
I think the key to making the prefab promise work is to develop a kit of parts that can be assembled in a custom way for a specific site and client, thus optimizing functional requirements, views and solar exposure, and ideally integrating the house with the topography of the site (if the site is sloping) rather than building a very unattractive platform to put the house up on.
http://www.iaacblog.com/digitaltectonics/wp-content/uploads/...
One thing that I don't get about "modernist" home design is all the big multi-use rooms. I hate that. I like separate rooms. Notice how it would be very uncomfortable for two people to live in any of these places. No privacy.
Also, many small rooms is energy efficient. Traditional English homes have a couple small rooms, with basically just enough room for two or three to sit around a very small fireplace or stove. Point being you can very efficiently heat just the small room.
I think these big, open space rooms are trying to evoke traditional Japanese design. But because they don't have ceiling to floor shoji screens they miss the whole point. Shoji are used to break up the space, achieve privacy, and also only heat a small space contained in a box of screens.
Two unrelated people, maybe. A married couple wouldn't have any trouble (unless the marriage itself was having trouble, of course).
They keep talking about energy efficiency but I don't believe it. With all that glass these houses must get very hot in the sun and very cold at night.
Her story sounds like a good one for the YC crowd too. She and her husband were looking for their own house and couldn't find anything they liked, so they designed their own home and the business just kind of took off from there. Classic case of 'building something people want', since they solved their own problem.
There's a Channel 4 programme called Grand Designs that featured a HH being built one week. Worth watching if you can find it somewhere.
If the writer meant square "meters", I would agree. But 341 square feet is a shoe box even in Tokyo.
"This green, sustainable house starts at JUST nearly a million dollars."
Are you freakin' kidding me? Let me know when you can start cranking these babies out in five figures.
Then it'll be worth something.
But I am surprised that these are so expensive. You'd think that a factory would have advantages over having guys come to a lot and building a house (imagine if we built cars that way). Maybe the volumes are too low to get much in the way of economies of scale.
I don't think prefab makes any sense for a premium modern house. You want to use materials like steel reinforced and chemically sealed concrete, stucco, stone, and perhaps solid hard wood. You can't feasibly transport this stuff from a factory to a building site pre-assembled. Prefab only potentially makes sense for light chintzy crap made out of wood and fiberglass, and even then on-site construction teams are very efficient at nailing together stick-wood houses on a concrete foundation so you're not going to save anything.
I could easily see something like this becoming ultra-cheap with economies of scale. Make them in a factory and ship them in a few truckloads, then snap them together almost like legos.
This is not the only alternative to wood and concrete. If you look around, a lot of people are working on modern (or not so modern) alternatives.