Steve Glenn is a former high-tech executive reinventing himself, at 42, as a real estate developer. His company, Living Homes, specializes in prefabricated, environmentally friendly architecture. At its debut project, a steel-frame house in Ocean Park designed by Ray Kappe, he greets you wearing shorts and sandals–and ambition on his sleeve.
The house is poised to reinvent how architecture is produced and marketed, Glenn says. It includes an “unprecedented” number of green-design features (a claim that William McDonough, Rafael Pelli and more than a few German and Scandinavian architects might dispute). He hired Kappe, a stalwart of Westside Modernism for four decades and a founder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, because he is the world’s “greatest living architect.”
Glenn is hardly the first in real estate to see modesty as a sign of professional weakness. And Kappe’s design for the two-story, 2,500-square-foot house, with its crisp wood-and-glass exterior and surprisingly complex interior spaces, is a selling point.
But the last thing the fledgling prefab movement needs is aggressive marketing or more hype. What it needs is a reality check.
For nearly five years now, design-savvy consumers priced out of the raging housing market–and that describes a lot of Americans, subscribing to Elle Decor and shopping at Design Within Reach while still writing a rent check each month–have looked to an emerging group of prefab, or modular, designs as a possible ticket to homeownership. These aren’t the cookie-cutter prefab buildings that dot the suburban landscape but a new breed of factory-built houses combining sleek, camera-ready design with the economies of mass production.
Their lineage can be traced to the Case Study architects of the 1940s and ’50s, experimental polymaths such as Buckminster Fuller and the developer Joseph Eichler, all of whom sought to bring high-quality residential architecture to a broad public.
Even Kappe, most ambitiously in an unbuilt scheme for a dorm at Sonoma State, has tried modular design.
Compared to traditional houses, the new prefabs can be built quickly, efficiently and inexpensively.
Gaining enthusiastic coverage in U.S. media and filling the message boards to bursting at fabprefab.com and other Web sites, they have proved wildly popular.
Or at least the notion has, because so few have been tested in the marketplace.
The handful finished thus far have mostly been built as homes for the architects or for a sponsoring magazine such as Dwell. (Glenn will live in the Kappe house while using it as a showroom for potential clients.) That’s allowed the houses’ creators to remain coy about cost overruns and other obstacles as they try to work out the prefab kinks. Meanwhile, the prices architects quote to buyers have been climbing, to $250 or even $300 per square foot today from $125 three years ago, pushing costs near the level of custom design.
Most new prefab construction is based on modules, often 12 feet wide, outfitted with wiring, plumbing, walls and even cabinetry and then delivered to the construction site on a flatbed truck. The most efficient way to assemble them is in a series of boxes, which explains why high-design prefabs by Jennifer Siegal, Marmol Radziner and others share the spare geometry of Modernist architecture. Those architects would argue, in the spirit of Louis Kahn, that a prefab house wants to take that shape. For them, form follows factory.
Kappe, though, has produced a version in Ocean Park that like his iconic early work, notably his own stunning 1967 house, tries to tug and push the Modernist box enough to create a collection of dynamic spaces and shifting interior views. Stitched together from 11 modules and wrapped in cedar panels and lots of glass, it was trickier to build than other prefabs. But it also has a sense of openness and sculpted space rare among its competitors.
The airy and sunlight-filled ground floor, with its polished concrete floors, is separated by grade changes rather than walls: A sunken kitchen and dining area is connected by a few steps to a double-height living room. From there you can see up to the second floor, which includes three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a small, awkwardly sited extra room that leads to the front terrace.
Even if Glenn’s claim that the house sets a global standard in green architecture is a bit of a reach, the design does include a long list of sustainable features, including a gray-water irrigation system, reclaimed wood, radiant heating and rooftop solar panels. It is in the running to receive one of the first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) ratings from the U.S. Green Building Council’s new certification program for residential architecture.
Perhaps as significant as the green elements is the way Glenn wields them as marketing tools.
Like the organic food movement, green architecture has reached a reckoning point, with broad popularity helping it challenge the wastefulness of the building trades but also threatening to dilute its core principles. Low-VOC paint and fly-ash countertops, in the hands of a new generation of opportunistic architects and developers, are on the verge of becoming what the hot tub was in the 1970s or the Sub-Zero refrigerator in the 1990s–killer amenities for a certain slice of the home-buying public.
You could say something similar, actually, about the design of the house.
For all its attempts to popularize cutting-edge construction techniques and green-building systems, in its debut offering Living Homes is selling a kind of architecture that will strike potential buyers, at least in a place such as Santa Monica, as more stylishly familiar than experimental.
Sloping lot affects cost
The lot Glenn chose for the Living Homes debut is less than a mile from the ocean and relatively flat, though it does slope down from north to south. Combined with the relative complexity of Kappe’s design and Santa Monica’s unforgiving code requirements, that modest grade made the house more expensive to build than the architect or developer anticipated.
Glenn says that construction costs, everything after the foundation was in place, were a shade under $250 a square foot, which for 2,500 square feet means roughly $600,000. But he won’t estimate how much the site work, foundation or sunken garage cost. It’s likely safe to assume that the total tab, which doesn’t include the land, approached, and perhaps exceeded, the million-dollar mark.
Which brings us to a stubborn contradiction of the high-design prefab business. Prefab construction lends itself to flat, accessible sites, so the trucks and cranes that bring the shell of the house to the lot can easily do their work.
And the parts of America where flat lots are readily available tend to be places where you can still buy a handsome three-bedroom house for as little as $350,000, leaving few buyers clamoring for a high-design prefab that might cost twice that.
In the regions where the market is expensive enough to make prefab such an enticing option–Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle, Boston or Washington, D.C., for example–most of the remaining vacant lots are steep or inaccessible or have been rejected by speculative builders for other reasons. On a lot like that, a pricey foundation, retaining walls or other site work is often required, cutting into the potential savings that draw customers to modular design.
