Prefab homes shed tawdry image

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/10/2005 (7300 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

RICKY and Bubbles aren’t likely to be found hanging around these trailer homes. Sleek and stylish structures the industry would rather call “prefabricated homes” are suddenly chic.

In a sure sign of the homes’ growing legitimacy, the New Yorker recently profiled a leading prefab builder, and the Vancouver Home and Interior Design show provided another of the industry’s current darlings prominent display for her Glidehouse, a modular, modern and environmentally sensitive design.

How is the prefab industry managing to shed its previously tawdry image? It’s all in the design.

“Homes that have been designed by architects across the continent now, they are slick, good-looking, modern and with lots of imagination,” says Avi Friedman, an architecture professor at Montreal’s McGill University. “Companies recognize that there are boomers out there with money who would like to build themselves a country home and they engage amazing designers to build them.”

The new prefab homes take their cues from the neat, sharp lines of modernist architecture.

“Everybody is now engaged to a clean line, minimalist, modernist aesthetic,” says John Shnier, a partner in the Toronto-based architecture firm of Kohn Shnier, which has designed an updated prototype line of prefabs called the Q series for Wingham, Ont.-based Royal Homes. “Even the most conservative of our clients like it.”

Shnier says publications like Dwell, a champion of modernist architecture, are responsible for prefab’s new leading-edge design. Geoffrey Warner, an architect in St. Paul, Minn., agrees, and adds design in North America has experienced a resurgence in the last decade because companies like Target and Apple have placed well-designed objects in front of consumers.

“People see magazines like Dwell, for instance, and are wondering, well, why can’t I have that? There are a number of different approaches to prefabrication that are getting us a little closer to actually picking up the phone and ordering one,” Warner says.

Warner builds a line of prefabs known as weeHouse because of their size, which can start as small as 32 square metres. He’s been negotiating with Royal for distribution in Canada.

Prefabrication home architect Rocio Romero was profiled in the October art and architecture issue of the New Yorker. Paul Goldberger, the magazine’s architecture critic, raves that Romero’s L.V. is an “exceptionally beautiful” house, and complements the Missouri-based architect’s designs for their “clarity, simplicity and grace.”

In Vancouver, the fuss was over Michelle Kaufmann. The homes show celebrated Kaufmann’s low-slung Glidehouse as “ultra-modern, sustainable and prefab!” The home, enroute to its new owners in Point Roberts, Wash., made its Canadian debut at the show.

The Glidehouse is about as far away from the trailer-trash aesthetic as you can get. Kaufmann, a San Francisco architect, emphasizes green, clean living, offering such options as geothermal heating and solar and wind power. The home features a “storage bar” with sliding wood doors that conceal the stuff behind them, as well as gliding glass doors on the opposite wall to open the home to the outside.

So who’s buying? Shnier says a New York Times’ architecture critic has asked after a Royal Q home. Others, he says, are people who want something built quickly and simply and who “want to touch the land lightly.”

Peter Venema, president of Royal Homes, says while the prefab market tends to attract people aged 50 and over who are buying their last home, the Q series is getting interest from professionals. He’s even had nibbles from “people who just want to have something that is a little different and who admire the modern style of architecture.”

Although the new generation of prefabs impress with their uptown appearance, they’re more likely to be built rurally, where it can be difficult to find a work crew to construct a home.

“You can ship the building to a site and build it in a day,” says Friedman, noting that while convenience may play a role in their popularity, the prefabs are often not any less expensive then conventional houses.

The reason prefabs are just as pricey is because they bring a lot of overhead with them. To set up a plant to build prefabs can cost upwards of $5 million for the factory, the machinery and the workers, according to Friedman.

On the other hand, the ability to build prefabs indoors means the homes are subject to a high degree of quality control. If it’s raining out, water doesn’t soak into wood or insulation. “There’s a quality control we think is an advantage to the consumer,” says Shnier.

One of the main benefits is speed of delivery, especially for those who might not have the patience for the drawn-out process of constructing an architect-built home, Shnier says. “It’s the quicker gratification, because architecture is a slow business.”

CNS 10/18/05 15:23:40