Nancy Hanover and Gerardo Reyes had already obtained permits to add a conventional bedroom/retreat to their 1923 bungalow when they happened to read a newspaper article last spring about a cutting-edge prefab called Glidehouse.
Taking its name from its gliding glass wall, the eco-friendly house, designed by San Francisco architect Michelle Kaufmann, is made of 14-foot-wide factory-built modules that come with plumbing, wiring, storage and shoji-like wooden screens already in place.
Hanover and Reyes, both elementary school teachers who say they are Modernists at heart, loved the “economical beauty” of its design, at a price they could afford (about $200 a square foot).
“We’re very interested in spaces, but we are also working people,” Hanover says. So they opted to do something unorthodox: build a 573-square-foot modern prefab add-on to their classic Craftsman-style house.
Today, dozens of architects and designers are experimenting with prefab, putting a decidedly hip new spin on manufactured housing.
Modern prefab housing has been popular in Europe for decades (increasingly so, thanks to Ikea and other sponsors), but the new surge in interest in the U.S. can be traced to January 2003. That’s when San Francisco-based Dwell magazine announced a competition inviting 16 architects and designers to design a forward-looking prefab house with a budget of $200,000.
This summer, the prototype of the winning Dwell Home, designed by Joseph Tanney and Robert Lutz of the New York firm Resolution: 4 Architecture, was unveiled in Pittsboro, N.C.
“We ended up buying every bottle of water in the county,” says Dwell Editor-in-Chief Allison Arieff, who expected 500 visitors at the sweltering site and got 2,500.
Trained by exposure to beautiful modern objects, from the iPod to the reborn Volkswagen Beetle, people want reasonably priced houses that reflect their taste and reflect well on them.
“There are a lot of people out there who are wide-eyed and excited about this idea,” said Michael Sylvester, an architect and business consultant who created www.fabprefab.com. “They feel like they’re design savvy and design aware” but see little, if anything, they want and can afford in the conventional real estate market.
Now Target, that unlikely purveyor of affordable objects of desire, has entered the fray. Ubiquitous designer Michael Graves is offering three prefab “pavilions” of varying degrees of modernity through Target. Costing $10,000 to $26,000, the customizable kits are produced by Lindal Cedar Homes and can be used as offices, guest rooms or whatever you need.
On a smaller scale, dozens of youngish architects are beginning to market prefab dwellings to a consumer audience starved for good, affordable, environmentally sensitive design–one that can be characterized by people who tend to have more taste than money.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com)
