Prefabulous
Cheap, green, and gorgeous prefab homes
put factory-made on the new frontier
Lisa Gansky knew she wanted to build a green weekend home. She
met with architects and contractors and at one point was walking
around with a cute model of the home she planned to build on
a prime piece of land at Stinson Beach.
“The trouble was, there was a disconnect between the architects’ beautiful
designs and what the general contractors said could be done,” says
Gansky, a tech entrepreneur who lives in Oakland. The costs were
escalating, and Gansky, whose business interests include an environmental
organization, was appalled at the amount of construction waste
her house was going to generate—all of which was destined
for the landfill—if she went ahead with a “stick-built” home.
Then she met Michelle Kaufmann, an Oakland architect who designs
modern prefabricated homes. “Everything came together,” says
Gansky. “The whole process was simple and holistic. Now
I know I am going to get an affordable home with a fresh aesthetic
and lots of green features, including solar panels and a green
roof.”
There’s nothing cookie-cutter about the three-story house,
which will grace a slope with breathtaking views of the Pacific.
Gansky is thrilled with the amount of customization the design
has allowed—including using reclaimed timber for some of
the posts and beams and the possibility of incorporating her
collection of sea glass, gathered over 20 years of visiting the
beach, into tailor-made concrete countertops.
Gansky is not alone in being enthusiastic about her prefab.
Dan Edmonds-Waters has created a dedicated website, www.napaprefab.com,
for his Napa prefab home, designed by Missouri–based architect
Rocio Romero. “I fell in love with the simple sophistication
of the Rocio Romero LV Home,” he says. “I like the
clean lines, the large expanse of glass, and the way this home
frames nature as art.” Interested in seeing what’s
so great about the prefab home? You can rent Edmonds-Waters’ house
for your next vacation through his website.
Modernist prefabs seem to inspire passion and are in
the early stages of a full-blown boom. Beautiful examples,
designed by some of our most exciting architects, are sprouting
up around the Bay Area.
In many ways this new generation of high-quality prefabs—with
their sleek, contemporary styling—represents the holy grail
of housing that frustrated Bay Area residents have been seeking.
Prefabricated homes are invariably cost-efficient, fast to build,
easy to customize, and environmentally friendly.
Prefabs are defined as homes that are partly or almost
wholly manufactured in a factory before being assembled,
sometimes in a matter of hours, on-site. In the bad old
days, the only nice thing you could say about prefabs was
that they were cheap. Now, homes designed by prefab greats
such as Michelle Kaufmann at MKD or San Francisco’s Clever Homes bear no relation to
the functional but undistinguished tract houses that used to
be associated with prefab methods. And prefabs still offer an
attractive price point in an inflated property market. Both companies
say their preconfigured homes cost about $200 to $300 per square
foot, or more if the site presents challenges or the homeowner
opts for customizations—some sandblasted glass, a lap pool,
or bamboo flooring, perhaps. The average price paid per square
foot for resale single-family homes in Contra Costa County this
year was $398. Charlie Lazor, the Minneapolis–based designer
of the Flatpak home, estimates his models are 20 to 30 percent
less expensive than comparable stick-built homes and take half
the time to design and build. “We provide a much more controlled
process and product,” he says.
Costs tend to be kept low through economies of scale,
short build times, and reduced waste rather than compromises
on quality. Indeed, advocates of prefabs would argue that
factory-controlled manufacturing, which includes precision
cutting, often means lower margins of error and higher
standards of craftsmanship.
Developers, motivated by the space and economical advantages,
are jumping on the prefab bandwagon. But in some
ways, the very nature of the process is blurring the line
between architect and developer. MKD, for instance, is building
dozens of single-family homes for clients across
the Bay Area, but is also in the planning stages for a development
of 24 multifamily homes in San Leandro.
In Southern California, the architectural firm Marmol
Radziner has three assembly lines creating steel-frame
prefab models at its factory in Vernon, California. The
homes are literally shrink-wrapped and delivered to their
site complete with walls, plumbing, cabinetry, and appliances.
The company’s prototype in Desert Hot Springs
is also the beautiful home of Managing Principal Leo Marmol.
Prefabs are also in tune with the times in
that they boast impeccable green credentials.
Steve Glenn, founder of Los Angeles–based
LivingHomes, says that about 40 percent of the construction material
for a stickbuilt house will end up in a landfill. This compares
with about 2 percent for prefabs.
Glenn’s home in Santa Monica, the first model for LivingHomes,
is a marvel of sustainability and was the first residential project
in the country to be awarded a LEED Platinum rating by the U.S.
Green Building Council—the organization’s highest
rating for “leadership in energy and environmental design.” Given
that 30 percent of waste output in the United States—136
million tons annually—comes from the construction of buildings,
this is not a bad thing. LivingHomes has five homes under contract
in the Bay Area and considers the area one of the company’s
biggest potential markets.
Many of the companies making prefabs are
aiming for LEED status for their homes. Ratings
of sustainability extend to the materials,
finishes, and fixtures chosen for their models. “Our goal
is to make thoughtful, sustainable design available to more people,” says
Kaufmann. “If one of our designs doesn’t meet that
objective, we won’t make it.”
The flexibility afforded by modular homes
means you can tweak a house to suit your
site or particular tastes before it is built
and reconfigure it to meet your needs a few
years later—moving
a wall to open up a bedroom once the children have flown the
coop, for instance, or adding an outside deck by putting in a
new floor plate. Prefabs appeal as much to first-time homeowners
as to empty nesters and to those, like Gansky and Edmonds-Waters,
seeking the sanctuary of a weekend retreat.
It may be preconfigured architecture,
but there’s clearly
nothing bland or inferior about the prefabs that have been championed
in recent years by modern design magazines and websites such
as fabprefab.com. The Bay Area has long shown itself to be open
to new ideas in architecture—whether it’s embracing
an idiosyncratic Bernard Maybeck craftsman in Berkeley in the
early 1900s or an envelope-pushing modernist home by Clarence
Mayhew in Orinda 50 years later. The new wave of 21st–century
prefabs look likely to find their place in that honorable tradition.
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