

Nine Cool Manufactured Houses - pg
http://stylecrave.com/2008-11-07/prefabulous-9-amazingly-modern-factory-built-homes/

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gibsonf1
The Ray Kappe RK1 LivingHome looks pretty good, but the rest are definitely
underwhelming to me. Even the RK1 suffers from some problems, such as a design
made without reference to the site its on - so things like views and solar
orientation will potentially suffer greatly. Also problematic is the flat roof
which is never a good idea for long-term leak and maintenance avoidance. As
good as the wood siding looks in the picture now, it will not hold up well and
will look terrible in a few years and create a big maintenance problem.

I think the key to making the prefab promise work is to develop a kit of parts
that can be assembled in a custom way for a specific site and client, thus
optimizing functional requirements, views and solar exposure, and ideally
integrating the house with the topography of the site (if the site is sloping)
rather than building a very unattractive platform to put the house up on.

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mixmax
Interesting to note how much light matters in a well designed house - it seems
that the position of windows are one of the major architectural feats to make
these houses great.

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yters
Helps people ignore the fact they all look like big boxes. That being said,
the designers have done well with their limitations, so I agree.

~~~
ksvs
Boxes can be good:

[http://www.iaacblog.com/digitaltectonics/wp-
content/uploads/...](http://www.iaacblog.com/digitaltectonics/wp-
content/uploads/2008/01/mies_farnsworth-house_blog.jpg)

~~~
kingkongrevenge
You really think that looks good? Looks like living in a fish tank to me.

One thing that I don't get about "modernist" home design is all the big multi-
use rooms. I hate that. I like separate rooms. Notice how it would be very
uncomfortable for two people to live in any of these places. No privacy.

Also, many small rooms is energy efficient. Traditional English homes have a
couple small rooms, with basically just enough room for two or three to sit
around a very small fireplace or stove. Point being you can very efficiently
heat just the small room.

I think these big, open space rooms are trying to evoke traditional Japanese
design. But because they don't have ceiling to floor shoji screens they miss
the whole point. Shoji are used to break up the space, achieve privacy, and
also only heat a small space contained in a box of screens.

~~~
randallsquared
"Notice how it would be very uncomfortable for two people to live in any of
these places."

Two unrelated people, maybe. A married couple wouldn't have any trouble
(unless the marriage itself was having trouble, of course).

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markbao
Beautiful houses—has the modular house stigma worn away in the past few years?
Because it should.

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Xichekolas
Definitely dig the Michelle Kaufmann homes. Her website is awesome in the
sheer volume of information it has. Most prefab home sites seem to just have
pictures and a phone number, whereas she has detailed pricing and videos and
testimony and talks a lot about sustainable design and self-sufficiency.

Her story sounds like a good one for the YC crowd too. She and her husband
were looking for their own house and couldn't find anything they liked, so
they designed their own home and the business just kind of took off from
there. Classic case of 'building something people want', since they solved
their own problem.

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ralph
Here in Europe, we have Huf Haus, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huf_Haus>

There's a Channel 4 programme called Grand Designs that featured a HH being
built one week. Worth watching if you can find it somewhere.

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tocomment
How much would it cost to build a little 1 BR house on your own? Any idea how
to get started with something like that? How do you learn how to build a
house? Is there a book?

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jhancock
"341 square feet (which would be a mansion in Manhattan). "

If the writer meant square "meters", I would agree. But 341 square feet is a
shoe box even in Tokyo.

~~~
wheels
Uhm, that's a pretty standard size for a studio apartment, and would be on the
big end for a Manhatten studio apartment. Note that that model is labeled
"studio".

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Harkins
I want a word that means "the kind of junk that Digg loves". Maybe "crapp".

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rokhayakebe
Rocio Romero is one of the nicest and most affordable prefabs out there. EDIT:
They should have added the container houses as well.

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ajkirwin
These are all nice, but the prices of them are, frankly, ridiculous.

"This green, sustainable house starts at JUST nearly a million dollars."

Are you freakin' kidding me? Let me know when you can start cranking these
babies out in five figures.

Then it'll be worth something.

~~~
rsheridan6
The Rocio Romera is about $23,000.

But I am surprised that these are so expensive. You'd think that a factory
would have advantages over having guys come to a lot and building a house
(imagine if we built cars that way). Maybe the volumes are too low to get much
in the way of economies of scale.

~~~
kingkongrevenge
Modern subdivision house construction is basically a moving assembly line.

I don't think prefab makes any sense for a premium modern house. You want to
use materials like steel reinforced and chemically sealed concrete, stucco,
stone, and perhaps solid hard wood. You can't feasibly transport this stuff
from a factory to a building site pre-assembled. Prefab only potentially makes
sense for light chintzy crap made out of wood and fiberglass, and even then
on-site construction teams are very efficient at nailing together stick-wood
houses on a concrete foundation so you're not going to save anything.

~~~
rsheridan6
There are modern alternatives to concrete and wood which are cheaper. A house
built of expanded polystyrene - basically a denser version of styrofoam with a
hard shell over it - can be had for a materials cost of about $30K
[http://manolohome.com/2008/08/11/the-habitat-for-the-21st-
ce...](http://manolohome.com/2008/08/11/the-habitat-for-the-21st-century/)

I could easily see something like this becoming ultra-cheap with economies of
scale. Make them in a factory and ship them in a few truckloads, then snap
them together almost like legos.

This is not the only alternative to wood and concrete. If you look around, a
lot of people are working on modern (or not so modern) alternatives.

