Trendsurfing: Prefab homes (The Times)
By David Rowan
You have perfected your stunning home interior, the ultimate blend of cutting-edge gadgetry and soft, natural surfaces. But before you invite Elle Deco round, you really will need to lose those walls. Brick and plaster are so 20th century, darling. Today's chic homeowner will settle for nothing less than a flat-pack prefab. The modernist prefabricated home is suddenly a hot item in the design community. Forget the postwar cliche of the claustrophobic box: today's factory assembled dwellings are the ultimate in stylish, eco-friendly cool. Call them "designer prefabs", "systems-built housing" or "modular flat-packs", they are built off-site and then trucked in to be assembled. And with demand booming from Europe to Australia, the concept is suddenly a mainstream alternative to bricks and slate.
The idea is not new: almost a century ago, Sears advertised mail-order homes in its shopping catalogue, and in the Seventies, Tokyo developers sold prefabricated "living capsules" to make efficient use of land. But with recent improvements in materials, amid concern about everything from the environment to housing shortages, serious Western architects are taking note. And now the store chains are muscling in.
Ikea, which built a flatpack village in Boklok, Sweden, has begun offering British customers its ready-to-install apartments. The open-plan flats are grouped in L-shaped blocks, starting at around £70,000 per residence. Meanwhile, Muji in Japan offers its "modelhouse" for around £100,000 including fittings, and in the US, Target has worked with architect Michael Graves to develop a kit house. The smallest units cost just £6,000, although a family-sized home, including land, costs more than £150,000.
No wonder the chains see huge profits ahead. The Freedonia Group, a US market-research firm, expects the prefab-housing market to be worth $12 billion by 2007, and investors such as Warren Buffett are buying into the manufacturing firms. Still, many of the most acclaimed prefabs are small-scale projects by less commercial architects. You can view examples at www.fabprefab.com, from the wooden "smallhouse", made by WeberHaus in Switzerland, to the "m-house", designed by Tim Pyne in London. Pyne's elegant house is technically a mobile home, which means it will not normally need planning permission. Still, it doesn't look much like a conventional caravan, and, at £150,000, is certainly not priced like one.
It is hard not to be awed by many of these structures, which typically show a remarkable creative vision. One of the most impressive is the eco-friendly Glidehouse by San Francisco designer Michelle Kaufmann, a former student of Frank Gehry, who has built the house around a series of sliding panels, which control the light and air-flow, using "environmentally sustainable" materials such as glass and bamboo. An Australian architectural practice, Stutchbury and Pape, has gone further: its self-assembly home is made from recycled cardboard, held together with polyester tape and Velcro. The roof, at least, is made from waterproof plastic.
Perhaps Britain is not yet ready for the cardboard house. But with key workers clamouring for low-cost homes, the modern-day prefab is getting John Prescott excited. Just don't mention his name when trying to impress Elle Deco.
(The Times, April 9 2005)
You have perfected your stunning home interior, the ultimate blend of cutting-edge gadgetry and soft, natural surfaces. But before you invite Elle Deco round, you really will need to lose those walls. Brick and plaster are so 20th century, darling. Today's chic homeowner will settle for nothing less than a flat-pack prefab. The modernist prefabricated home is suddenly a hot item in the design community. Forget the postwar cliche of the claustrophobic box: today's factory assembled dwellings are the ultimate in stylish, eco-friendly cool. Call them "designer prefabs", "systems-built housing" or "modular flat-packs", they are built off-site and then trucked in to be assembled. And with demand booming from Europe to Australia, the concept is suddenly a mainstream alternative to bricks and slate.
The idea is not new: almost a century ago, Sears advertised mail-order homes in its shopping catalogue, and in the Seventies, Tokyo developers sold prefabricated "living capsules" to make efficient use of land. But with recent improvements in materials, amid concern about everything from the environment to housing shortages, serious Western architects are taking note. And now the store chains are muscling in.
Ikea, which built a flatpack village in Boklok, Sweden, has begun offering British customers its ready-to-install apartments. The open-plan flats are grouped in L-shaped blocks, starting at around £70,000 per residence. Meanwhile, Muji in Japan offers its "modelhouse" for around £100,000 including fittings, and in the US, Target has worked with architect Michael Graves to develop a kit house. The smallest units cost just £6,000, although a family-sized home, including land, costs more than £150,000.
No wonder the chains see huge profits ahead. The Freedonia Group, a US market-research firm, expects the prefab-housing market to be worth $12 billion by 2007, and investors such as Warren Buffett are buying into the manufacturing firms. Still, many of the most acclaimed prefabs are small-scale projects by less commercial architects. You can view examples at www.fabprefab.com, from the wooden "smallhouse", made by WeberHaus in Switzerland, to the "m-house", designed by Tim Pyne in London. Pyne's elegant house is technically a mobile home, which means it will not normally need planning permission. Still, it doesn't look much like a conventional caravan, and, at £150,000, is certainly not priced like one.
It is hard not to be awed by many of these structures, which typically show a remarkable creative vision. One of the most impressive is the eco-friendly Glidehouse by San Francisco designer Michelle Kaufmann, a former student of Frank Gehry, who has built the house around a series of sliding panels, which control the light and air-flow, using "environmentally sustainable" materials such as glass and bamboo. An Australian architectural practice, Stutchbury and Pape, has gone further: its self-assembly home is made from recycled cardboard, held together with polyester tape and Velcro. The roof, at least, is made from waterproof plastic.
Perhaps Britain is not yet ready for the cardboard house. But with key workers clamouring for low-cost homes, the modern-day prefab is getting John Prescott excited. Just don't mention his name when trying to impress Elle Deco.
(The Times, April 9 2005)
posted by David Rowan at Saturday, April 09, 2005
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