The Proof is in the Prefab

Story by Allison Arieff

With herself as guinea pig, architect Michelle Kaufmann conducted the perfect prefab experiment: Design a house. Build one onsite, one in the factory. Watch what happens.

In the much-maligned, often-overhyped, and frequently misunderstood world of prefabricated construction, one of the most common questions asked is “Why prefab?” And there is perhaps no better answer to that question than architect Michelle Kaufmann’s first two Glidehouses—one prefab, one not.

The process of building the two homes simultaneously gave Kaufmann the perfect laboratory in which to hone her skills and perfect her process. “I’m done with site-built,” she says. “Going through this convinced me of the benefits of modular.”

Like many first-time home buyers, Kaufmann and her husband, Kevin Cullen, were frustrated by what the market had to offer. In the astronomically priced San Francisco Bay Area, where a modest single-family home for $750,000 is considered a “deal,” there were precious few houses in their price range—and those that were were not at all the sort of places they saw themselves living in. After months of Sundays spent trudging through open houses, Kaufmann, who’d recently left Frank Gehry’s architectural office, and Cullen, a builder and woodworker, changed their strategy. In the spring of 2003, they found land in Novato, California (25 miles north of San Francisco), on which to build their own home. “We were excited,” says Kaufmann, “and luckily naïve, not knowing what was ahead. Had we actually known, I think we would have been very afraid.”

Things began to move as rapidly as their search for land. A design had to be submitted within the 45-day escrow period. Cullen, who would act as general contractor, was pushing for as sustainable a house as possible.

“My 83-year-old Uncle Joe instilled a great respect for the outdoors in me and was the first person I ever heard talk about sustainable building,” explains Cullen. “So I’d been hearing about things like passive solar, photovoltaics, water catchment and renewable resources for years.”

“Sustainability is the driving force of what we do,” says Kaufmann of her firm, Michelle Kaufmann Designs (MKD). Accordingly, Kaufmann and Cullen opted for structural insulated panels (SIPs), believing they would offer the best insulation and save time and money in construction. However, the time and money part “ended up not being true,” says Kaufmann. So even as they proceeded with SIPs for their own home, they began to explore other alternatives that would offer the same level of sustainability—and the anticipated savings in time and money they’d hoped for—in future projects.

“During this time friends and colleagues were forced to listen to us talk about our house and its design,” says Kaufmann, whose affable manner no doubt made her tales of building woe intriguing to those in earshot. “Many were in similar situations and asked if I might do something like our house for them.” So in the summer of 2003, Kaufmann divided her time between building her own home and researching factory fabrication options.

Most factories Kaufmann contacted didn’t return her calls—an experience not uncommon among architects hoping to do modern prefab homes. Those factories that did respond did so quizzically, unable to understand why anyone would want such a house and, thus, why the factory would want to build one.

Realizing that for factories to even entertain her requests she’d have to prove the market was there, Kaufmann started working on a small website that described her project. Meanwhile, work continued on Kaufmann and Cullen’s own Glidehouse and it was slow going. Drawings needed revising, bids were coming in higher than original estimates, and because of a Bay Area building and renovating boom, subcontractors were hard to come by. By September, permits had been approved for Glidehouse #1 and Kaufmann’s website for the Glidehouses of the future went live.

By November 2003, site work, clearing, grading, and septic construction began on her house—and, as for the modular Glidehouses, says Kaufmann, “my faith and stalking finally paid off.” A mention on fabprefab.com helped: Factories began to show some interest, and Sunset magazine contacted her to discuss building a Glidehouse for their annual celebration weekend in Menlo Park, California. Just after Thanksgiving, Kaufmann got her first client for a modular Glidehouse (let’s call it #2) in the Lake Chelan area of Washington State: Andrew Reid, a branch manager and loan consultant with Countrywide, the largest home mortgage lender in the United States (which does not treat modular any differently than a traditional stick-built home).

“Both the incredible aesthetics of the Glidehouse and its sustainable construction were huge draws for us,” explains Reid. “Being prefab wasn’t really important, except in that it fit nicely with our time line.”

The trajectories of #1 and #2 began to diverge quite dramatically (see p. 176). Kaufmann was pleased to discover how many things could happen simultaneously with the modular project (i.e., bids could be reviewed while drawings were being approved for permits instead of waiting for that approval). But she and Cullen were both despondent that, by April 2004, the factory-built house was speeding past the SIPs house.

“Seeing Andrew’s completed house,” says Cullen, “was like seeing a dead relative come back to life. I returned to our own house, still in its framing stages, bare copper pipes and electrical wires sticking out from all the walls, wondering what the hell was taking me so long.”

As winter approached, Kaufmann and Cullen had to start paying their construction loan. Unable to afford both mortgage and rent, they moved into their not-quite-finished home. But by the end of 2004, they were settled, and immediately began enjoying their house, not to mention their $0 energy bills, thanks to the solar panels. (“We hooked into Pacific Gas & Electric, so we sell back on sunny days and buy back on gray days,” says Kaufmann.)

Kaufmann’s experience building #1 and #2 not only offered a lifetime’s worth of character building, it was integral in helping her to become one of the few contemporary practitioners to actually make modern prefab work as both a business and a way of building.

“When I told my wife that all homes might be factory-built in the future,” recalls Reid, “she thought I had lost my mind.” The incredible success of Kaufmann’s vision, however, made the Reids converts—and perhaps the rest of us, too.

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Modular Skyscraper!

Skyscraper Design Gets A New Spin
By Michael Kanellos
Friday, April 20, 2007

You’ve likely heard of skyscrapers topped with rotating rooftop restaurants. But what about a whole rotating skyscraper?

Leave it to Dubai, the United Arab Emirates state known for wild architectural endeavors, to be the planned home for such a tower. The $350 million Dynamic Architecture building, a project of an eponymous Florence, Italy-based firm led by architect David Fisher, will literally spin–with each individual floor self-propelled, voice-controlled and even capable of generating environmentally friendly power.

It’s out there for sure. But the architecture firm has been touting the “club” of investors, firms and industry bigwigs behind the project as evidence that yes, though it might sound implausible, the “tower in motion” is for real. The “club” includes New York-based LERA, a structural engineering firm with a resume including the original World Trade Center towers and the Shanghai World Financial Center; German heating and plumbing manufacturer Viega; and British construction management company Bovis Lendlease.

When completed, Dynamic Architecture’s flagship tower will stand 68 stories (1,027 feet) tall, and contain offices, apartments, a “6-star” hotel, a 64th-floor heliport, and five premium “villas” on the top floor (the priciest of which will contain a swimming pool and garden).

The ambitious plans for the building were announced at a press conference earlier this month at the Burj Al Arab, a luxury hotel with a sail-shaped design and meticulously highbrow detail–a full team of British aquarium specialists employed to tend to the fish tanks, for example–that have become icons of Dubai’s recent, oil-fueled building boom.

But the Dynamic Architecture skyscraper promises to stand out even from its Dubai brethren; the tower will largely be the product of modular construction. This strategy, which involves building homes and buildings or parts of buildings in factories, is expected to grow significantly in the coming decade because it can reduce costs and is more “green” than traditional construction.

Building in a factory essentially eliminates many of the risks and problems of the outdoors. Plywood and other building materials no longer have to sit around the job site, where they can get warped or coated with mold. In the end, this leads to sharper, tighter construction, according to advocates. Jobs get done more quickly, too, because electricians and other subcontractors can work simultaneously. Additionally, architects say that factory building gives them more opportunities to experiment with eco-friendly technologies like bamboo flooring.

In the case of the Dynamic Architecture tower, 90 percent of the building will be constructed in an industrial plant in the port town of Jebel Ali. It will then be assembled on a central “core,” which will be built with traditional construction techniques in an estimated six months. The core also will be a fixed structure–which helps if you’re trying to travel from floor to floor in a building where the floors can rotate independently of each other.

Dynamic Architecture estimates that it will take only about a week to assemble and “stack” a floor onto the core once it’s constructed. Production and installation, according to the firm, will require 90 on-site technicians and workers, as opposed to a traditional 2,000–ambitious, indeed.

The modular-building aspect of the skyscraper is innovative, for sure. But what everyone will be talking about will undoubtedly be the fact that it rotates. Each of the building’s 68 floors will be autonomous–the 48 prefabricated modules that comprise each floor will be already fitted with electricity, plumbing and air conditioning. On each floor, these are connected with a “smart joint” developed by Bosch that allows power from systems in the central core to flow onto the moving floors’ infrastructures. According to architect Fisher, the plumbing and electricity systems are largely influenced by technologies used in military aircraft in which one jet fuels another while both are aloft.

The floors’ motions, too, are individually controlled. Through voice activation, presumably through a central hub on each floor, the level can turn to position it according to where the daylight is, change the views, or even just rotate slowly for the effect.

These days, it often goes without saying that an audacious new urban construction project is green. But since it seems like just about every real estate endeavor in Dubai has to be larger-than-life, the Dynamic Architecture tower’s energy infrastructure is, well, greener-than-life. The team behind it hopes that it will optimally be able to power not only itself, but five other buildings of equivalent size.

The driving force behind this is a set of 48 horizontal wind turbines, fitted between the rotating floors, that are expected to produce 1.2 million kilowatt-hours of energy annually–worth an estimated $7 million. The firm estimates that no more than eight of the turbines will be needed to power the building, and consequently the remaining 40 will be left available to provide energy for neighboring structures.

Additional green energy will be contributed by solar panels affixed to the roof of the building.

According to Fisher, construction on the tower should begin by the end of 2007 and be complete within 18 months. Should its inaugural tower in Dubai prove successful, Dynamic Architecture has no plans to stop there. The firm hopes to continue production of building modules at its factory in Jebel Ali, with a goal of building similar towers in 11 other cities including Tokyo, New York, Moscow and Milan.

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Altamont Homes Grows

Despite New Construction Woes Altamont Homes Continues to Grow and Diversify
2007-04-18

MARTINEZ, Calif., April 18 /PRNewswire/ — There has been much recent press about the decline in new homes sales for the first part of 2007, but Altamont Homes, Inc., a licensed general contractor, has not been negatively affected; the company has recently expanded to seven western states — California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Arizona.

According to Eric Peterson, President of Altamont Homes, Inc., the reason for this expansion is due to the company’s specialization in off-site construction. Altamont Homes sells and performs the on-site assembly of homes and multi-family buildings which are built off-site in controlled-factory environments.

These are not manufactured or mobile homes; they are conventional housing with the same amenities, appearance, financing, and code compliance as houses built on-site. This type of construction is commonly known as pre-built or true modular housing in Eastern and Central portions of the U.S., but it has only recently started making a significant impact in the West.

The Automated Building Consortium reported that between 1995 and 2005, this type of construction has steadily been on the rise; it has more than doubled.

One of the main reasons for the rise in popularity is cost. Peterson explains that California homes that are identical to theirs, but “stick-built” on site by a contractor cost between $175 and $300 per square foot.

Altamont Homes can save clients hundreds of thousands of dollars by building homes off-site in an efficient and quality-controlled production facility.

Altamont Homes works with 16 different factory suppliers throughout the West to provide developers and custom-home clients with the best off-site built housing choice for their needs, location, and budget.

A full spectrum of services is offered to clients through all phases of the building process. This includes: obtaining permits, grading, installing utilities, building foundations, on-site assembly and finish of the off-site built homes. Altamont Homes also provides project consulting services and training to other contractors and developers.

Houses range from standard to luxury. Project managers will work with clients to customize elements to create the home of their dreams.

“We may be the only construction company in the West that has the experience and ability to deliver, assemble and finish off-site constructed homes in any part of any of the seven states that we are licensed in,” Peterson said.

Altamont Homes has assembly and finish crews that are mobile and capable of assembling and finishing a single home or a whole development in a remote area in a cost effective and efficient manner.

“Attention to detail and excellence in workmanship is never sacrificed,” Peterson explained.

Altamont Homes is also planning the launch of a new web site to showcase their custom, luxury off-site constructed homes that can be delivered and assembled anywhere in the states that it currently serves.

For more information, visit: http://www.altamonthomes.com

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Sears Catalog Houses Become Obsession

Associated Press
Sunday April 15, 2007

CARLINVILLE, Ill. (AP) — She speaks with the fervor of a woman possessed. In the cadence of a grange hall auctioneer, Laurie Flori jabs a finger at each house on her street, every one ordered from Sears, Roebuck and Co.

“That’s a Carlin,” she pronounces. “That’s a Whitehall. That’s a Warrenton. That’s a Lebanon.”

Starting nearly a century ago, these stately names were bestowed upon a modest line of homes that could be purchased by mail. To Flori, they are verses in a hymn to working-class America, to a time when things were built better and cost less, when everything in the Sears catalog looked bigger and better than ordinary life.

For a while, the American dream shimmered on those pages, just as obtainable as a pair of work boots or dungarees.

A house of one’s own. Outhouse and plumbing extra. A great deal of assembly required.

Flori’s worship of these houses has been known to propel her right up the porch steps of people she’s never met to proclaim they have history in their joists and it’s their civic duty to preserve it.

Sometimes the folks at home are intrigued. Sometimes they have no idea what she’s going on about, and couldn’t care less.

At all times, this stout, mile-a-minute talker is a woman obsessed: By houses that during a 32-year span could be sent away for and ordered on credit. Houses that arrived with precut lumber and numbered for easy assembly, with 750 pounds of nails and enough paint for two coats.

She is not alone in this self-appointed mission. Across the country, otherwise ordinary people have been transformed by obsession into identifying and preserving “kit houses” from Sears. They drive through unfamiliar neighborhoods armed with flashlights and fervor, searching for a telling detail of a specific model — the gabled roof of the Warrenton, the dormer windows of the Medford.

They pound the doors of strangers, seeking admittance to their basements, searching for exposed beams with telltale Sears assembly numbers. They proselytize preservation with the fervor of Jehovah’s Witnesses shoving copies of the Watchtower through a cracked screen door.

Yet they are as similar and dissimilar as the 447 floor plans that Sears delivered.

“It’s like King Tut and the Titanic,” said Marilyn Raschka, who used to cover the bedlam of Beirut as a foreign correspondent and now lives in Hartford, Wis. “It’s utterly fascinating.”

“It’s history,” said Rebecca Hunter, a historian who lectures on preservation and lives in Elgin, Ill. “It’s part of our heritage. And we have to do it ourselves because apparently Sears threw out everything.”

Flori, true to her nature, is a little more blunt. “The only way I can explain it,” she says, and falls into laughter, “is that it’s like a cult.”

All are fighting to identify and preserve whatever is left of the estimated 100,000 houses sold by Sears. It is not easy. No one knows where all of them are because Sears, over the years, destroyed most of its sales records. So people like Raschka and Hunter and Flori rely on their wits to seek out houses and authenticate them.

Other companies offered catalog homes — Montgomery Ward, for example, and the Michigan-based Aladdin Co. But it is Sears — because of name recognition — that gets the most attention.

The city of Carlinville is a special case. It encompasses nine blocks of nothing but Sears houses, the largest concentration in the country. The homes constituted a $1 million order placed by Standard Oil of Indiana in 1918. The fuel giant purchased nearly 200 dwellings to house an influx of miners and managers for 400-foot-shafts it was sinking in southern Illinois.

They called this new neighborhood the Standard Addition. They built a park and schools nearby. The city extended its limits so water and sewer lines could greet new homeowners.

Young Carlinville was in love. Here were symbols of prosperity and security for a small town in southern Illinois. Here was the promise of better times ahead. In brand new homes, courtesy of the Sears catalog — whose copies traveled their own journey, in-house to outhouse.

———

The American dream arrived in a box — in scores and scores of boxes, crammed with doorknobs and oak doors, manhandled into box cars, then pulled by steam engine across ribbons of railroad track pushing West.

In that place and time, what arrived from afar inspired hosannahs. Mystery deliveries came from big cities. Creature comforts were unwrapped in new, raw land. Hope came packaged in pretty paper.

And Sears was selling the biggest consumer good of all.

The price was cheap. The materials were not. Cypress shingles, bronze door hinges, glazed windows, granite bathtubs. They came in styles and shapes and sizes befitting a wealthy farm owner. They also came in smaller sizes, at prices affordable to even an immigrant coal miner.

They carried evocative names such as The Montrose, a seven-room, one-bath Eastern colonial with green shutters, flower boxes and a hooded gable entrance. “Justly considered a beautiful home in any community, no matter how exclusive,” said the catalog.

They were sold from 1926 to 1929, at prices ranging from $2,923 to $3,324. Sears estimated its prices were 30 percent to 40 percent lower than market rates.

Then there was Modern Home No. 55MP22, priced at about $400. It was a three-room cottage too small to qualify as even a shotgun shack. Sears boasted the house could be raised in eight hours, from floorboards to window shades, and offered photographic proof.

Blurred black-and-white catalog photos from the turn of the 20th century showed four stages of assembly with a big clock in the foreground of each frame. At 7:45 a.m., the lumber lies in piles. At 9:30 a.m. three side walls are up, as are some interior partitions. At 4:30 p.m., the entire house is done, complete with a very modest front porch.

Sears offered its own mortgages. Over time, it would offer mortgages for land as well, even though it was purchased separately. Regional lumber mills went up near transportation hubs to keep up with demand.

But then came the Great Depression, and there went the houses-by-mail boom. Working-class Americans defaulted on their Sears mortgages. Families went even farther West, to California, where it was said there were jobs picking crops.

So in 1940, Sears got out of the business of making life-size dollhouses.

And despite all of the adoration from people like Flori, the place of Sears homes in architectural history is decidedly modest, just like the houses.

Their blueprints were hybrids of what was popular at the time — Craftsman-style bungalows, Dutch colonials, mansard roofs. Sears was “marketing something to the broad population,” said Paul Lusignan, spokesman for the National Register of Historic Places. “It was very common.”

Sears architects never aspired to the heights of Greene & Greene or Frank Lloyd Wright. Simply put, they mostly designed common houses for common people.

———

Standard Oil bought nine models for Carlinville’s Standard Addition, all of them two-story homes of five to six rooms, plus a lavatory. If one preferred an outhouse, such accommodations were available for an additional $41.

Carlinville construction began in 1918, after a special spur of the Chicago & Alton Railroad was laid to accommodate the new homes. One house usually occupied two boxcars, and home deliveries were staggered, designed to deliver supplies as they were needed. First came building paper, lumber, nails, and framing. The final shipment brought millwork and a bathtub.

A horse or a mule dragged wagon load after wagon load to large lots averaging 47 feet by 144 feet.

At extra cost, Sears also provided contractors and building supervisors; “Hercules Heating Systems”; built-in bookcases with leaded glass doors, and electrical appliances (a 1920s Sears home catalog illustration shows a woman in heels, delirious at the helm of an upright vacuum).

In Carlinville, Standard Oil hired a female construction supervisor who oversaw construction. According to lore, Elizabeth Spaulding ruled on horseback, trotting from lot to lot, firing men she had hired in the morning who displeased her by lunch.

At the mines, hundreds were hired to mine coal veins in the waning months of World War I, when many men were still overseas. Immigrants came by the thousands, fresh off trans-Atlantic ships and lured by good wages — about $6 a day when most company mines paid only by the number of tons a man could heave into a coal car.

Standard Oil also carried the new homes’ mortgages, 10-year notes payable at $30 to $40 per month.

The town surged in size and wealth. New businesses opened, catering to the rise in population and income. And for a time, life in Carlinville seemed as good as the pages of any catalog.

And then it didn’t. Seven years later, Standard Oil up and left. The mines went silent. The gasoline company had discovered it could buy coal cheaper than paying men to haul it out of the ground. And that was that.

The miners needed work, so they abandoned their Sears homes and their mortgages and moved to another coal dig. Every home loan fell into foreclosure, and the city still owed for water and sewer lines extended to a now-empty neighborhood.

The deserted houses stood silent, and derelict. Years later, Standard Oil auctioned the blighted houses at rock-bottom prices ranging from $400 to $500.

It has been more than 60 years since the company blew town, and still there remains a bitter vein of disappointment, deep as the now-capped mines. It helps fuel Laurie Flori’s burning obsession to save every neglected Sears house she can find.

———

The self-appointed curator of Carlinville is sometimes an annoyance.

“With some of the people, I’m not popular and I don’t care,” she says. “When they die, what are they going to say? I can say I really tried.”

To Flori, “trying” means that she has snapped pictures of Addition homes she considers “trashy,” printed copies, and distributed the photographs like wanted posters to the City Council in hopes its members would make the residents step to.

“What she wants if for all the houses to look as nice as when they were first built,” said Mayor Robert Schwab, who answers his own phone in City Hall.

“But one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

Flori and her husband, David, moved to Carlinville in the 1980s from a nearby town. David Flori had grown up in the Addition, and he wanted to go home. They paid $18,000 for a Roseberry model, with its wide front porch and an intersecting gable roof.

Little by little, Flori redid the inside until the small house was restored. In the process, it also became a monument to Sears.

She hung old Standard Addition construction photos and Sears wallpaper. In her basement office, she filled files with Sears home catalog pages. In scrapbooks, she pasted yellowed newspaper clippings heralding the fortune to be made — and the good life that would surely follow — for any man who came to work at the Standard Oil mines.

Flori remembers how some tried to talk her out of coming to this side of town. “People told us not to buy in the Standard Addition. They said, `Oh, that’s the slum area.’”

She wrinkles her nose.

“I set out to change that,” she said. “A Sears home is something to be proud of.”

There are moments when Flori wishes she had lived in the time when Sears and Standard Oil came to Carlinville. When seemed to swell with promise, and the future appeared oh, so big. The way a grandparent’s house looks enormous to a child building a fort under the kitchen table.

And so amazingly small to the returning adult, worn by experience and dimmed by disappointment, who no longer fits under the table, and has to duck at the top of the narrow stairs.

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Modular Classrooms

Portables Could Provide Relief
By Brent Schanding
April 11, 2007

Portable classrooms may be necessary to alleviate a swell in projected student populations, according to Kerry Whitehouse, assistant superintendent of operations for Shelby County Schools.

In a memo to board of education members released Thursday, Whitehouse said it could be more than three years before a permanent student facility is built. So the addition of four portable units — that would provide eight additional classrooms — could offer temporary relief to crowded high school students.

“We’re very comfortable this will help absorb this growth for the next three years,” Whitehouse said.

More permanent relief will come from a forthcoming campus development on Ardmore Lane, which will house a new district high school, in addition to middle and elementary schools. Tentative plans call for the new high school to be ready by 2010, with construction of other schools to follow.

“With the construction we should get relief enough where we can remove the portables if they’re not needed in three years,” Whitehouse said.

Whitehouse said portables could be set up at the west end of the school or near the school’s music wing. The board still has to approve the use of portables.

The units, similar to modular homes, have previously been leased at East Middle and other schools in the district to address crowding concerns.

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Homes Ready To Roll

Factory-built houses getting upscale look
By Jim Wasserman
Sunday, April 8, 2007

Factory-built housing is touting environmental benefits and a fresh look to win a new generation of buyers as the industry continues to fight an image of cheap design and endure the same housing slowdown pummeling conventional home builders.

Among the industry’s innovations: tiny backyard houses where baby boomers can house aging parents, two-story log houses and one of California’s first three-story factory-built town houses — now selling in West Sacramento.

The century-old manufactured-housing industry still competes with prices estimated at 20 percent to 25 percent lower than building on site and faster move-in time. And its housing remains a fixture of the highways, where trucks haul their wide loads — half a home at a time — to their locations. But the nation’s housing slump and tighter lending standards for factory-built homes are forcing some changes that tilt toward more upscale buyers.

Fans of what’s variously called “prefab” or “modular” or “manufactured” housing say the industry is poised for new growth as architects explore fresh designs and more people associate the housing style with higher standards, better energy efficiency and less construction waste. If so, benefits could spill over regionally, where four home-building factories — three in Woodland and one in Sacramento — are among California’s 10 house manufacturing plants.

Definitions abound for this type of housing and can be confusing to buyers. “Manufactured” homes – the majority – are built to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development code that industry experts say makes “a well-built” house. “Modular” or “prefab” homes are fewer in number but tend to be higher end, more expensive and conform to the state’s stricter Uniform Building Code. It’s the modular sector that’s grabbing the most attention for cutting-edge design.

“In the Northeast it’s been a really big business, and it’s been going across the country,” said Sheri Koones, Connecticut-based author of “Prefabulous,” a book exploring breakthrough factory-built homes from Massachusetts to San Francisco Bay. The book features log homes, lodges and mansions — all built in factories.

“There’s a tremendous need in California, particularly because everyone is so interested in energy efficiency and sustainability and green construction,” Koones said in a telephone interview.

Already, a Sacramento factory that built the West Sacramento town houses has geared up to do more higher-end house construction. Another factory in Woodland is making a similar move.

“It’s still a small part of our overall product,” said Allan Lemley, general manager of a Karsten Homes factory in Sacramento, where 150 employees manufacture up to two houses a day. “But we expect it to grow.”

Behind the move are harder-to-get home loans for manufactured houses produced in California. (Last year, nearly 8 percent of the 107,000 new single-family houses built in the state were produced in factories.) Lenders are skittish about loaning to buyers of mobile homes and manufactured homes because so many defaulted in the 1990s after a run of easy credit. The lending crackdown has shrunk the industry nationally to about a third of its former production — to about 117,000 houses a year from 350,000 — said Lemley. Indeed, the industry’s big publicly traded companies have seen their stock prices hammered just like the nation’s biggest home builders.

“Now with modular you can get the same kind of financing as a site-built house,” Lemley said.

As Lemley aims to build more modular houses and Koones touts them as the future of factory-built homes, they still represent a mere sliver of the industry in California. Of 8,281 factory-manufactured homes sold last year in the state, only 329 were in the higher-end modular segment, said Jess Maxcy, president of a Rancho Cucamonga-based industry trade group, the California Manufactured Housing Institute.

He said about 1.4 million Californians live in 658,000 manufactured homes in the state. Though nearly six in 10 are in mobile home parks, today’s trend is away from mobile homes, Maxcy said. Typically, nearly 70 percent of manufactured houses are now put on regular home lots. Locally, Karsten officials say, most still end up in rural areas.

Harriet Lane, the factory-built West Sacramento town-house development, is a modular project that conforms to state standards. The houses were built in sections at the Karsten plant and then assembled at its site. Now finished, with an edgy urban look of metal and wood, the project offers views of the Sacramento skyline and sells individual town houses for $339,000 to $359,000. Like nearly all factory-built housing it looks the same inside as any other project.

Fairfield-based Valley Home Development has carved out another niche with its new “granny unit.” That’s in response to a 2004 state law making it easier to build small second houses on existing residential lots.

“A lot of the (manufactured housing) segment has been concerned that its business has slowed. We’re going the other direction. We’re ramping up,” said the firm’s owner, Steve Vallejos.

“We found out our target market is the baby boomers. They’re dealing with their aging parents as well as their kids,” he said.

The one-bedroom, one-bath manufactured homes are sized from 400 square feet to 1,200 square feet and cost between $36,000 and $65,000. Total costs with installation, permits and fees usually run about twice the home’s cost, he said.

“The whole process takes about three months, from permits approved to handing them the keys,” Vallejos said. The tiny houses are built at the Woodland factory of Western Homes Corp., a division of Michigan-based Champion Enterprises Inc.

In Karsten’s Sacramento factory, houses are typically built in half sections and then assembled at the home site. The houses start as newly built floors on the north side of the 100,000-square-foot-interior facility and are gradually rolled south where teams of workers add walls, a roof, windows and interior walls. Eventually, in a process that takes about two weeks to build a house, workers paint interiors and install cabinets, appliances and lights before the half houses are rolled outside for trucks to haul away.

Recently, a dozen manufactured homes were displayed at Cal Expo, one of many home shows where retailers and manufacturers put their wares before the public. Prices ranged from $60,000 to more than $200,000, not including cost of land, fees and thousands more dollars for foundations and site preparation.

“We’re trying to get out there and change people’s perceptions,” said Maxcy, with the California Manufactured Housing Institute.”Those perceptions are often rooted in past decades when the industry kept costs low at the expense of good design, Koones said. Often, too, perceptions are associated with an unpopular word in the industry: “trailers.”

“The quality of the product today is vastly different than what it was 20 years ago,” said Dan DeVarennes, Karsten sales manager. “Consumer demand has changed. The consumer has really pushed us. They don’t want the old trailers.”

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“Prefabulous” by Sheri Koones

Learn All You Need To Know About Prefab Homes
BY ROBERT J. BRUSS
April 7, 2007

Normally, I am turned off by real estate books with clever, cute titles such as “Prefabulous” by Sheri Koones. However, not by this great, new, book that completely changed my mind about so-called “prefab” homes, which are custom built in factories to the specifications of the buyers.

A better name for the homes described and photographed in this book is “modular.” But even that term doesn’t fully reveal the many different types of homes that can be designed by your architect to fit a specific lot or adapted from plans found in catalogs. So-called “manufactured homes” are not included in this book because they are covered by a separate building code.

As with all Taunton Press “coffee-table-quality” books with lots of color photos, the only word to describe this one is “amazing.” It includes all prefab systems that are used to engineer and assemble homes in factories, then ship them on trucks to the home site. Panelized, log, timber-frame, concrete, hybrids and steel-frame homes are included.

Famous author and home designer Sarah Susanka says in her forward to the book “For some people, words like modular, manufactured, panelized and prefabricated conjure up visions of ticky-tacky subdivisions in which every house looks just the same. But the biggest story in ‘Prefabuous’ is that just because something is made in a factory doesn’t mean it has to be boring or the same as hundreds of other houses.”

Reasons for building a prefab home, rather than a “stick-built” traditional residence, are many. They include cost savings, fast construction time, greater energy efficiency, better structural integrity and improved warranties.

Author Sheri Koones has compiled a photo gallery of dozens of prefab homes of all styles, located throughout the United States and Canada, which show the flexibility of prefab houses. Not only are the finished homes shown, but the factory construction processes reveal the exacting standards, including computerized, highly accurate machinery to save time and labor.

Unless you knew the homes pictured in this book were built in modules in a factory, trucked to the site and then assembled into one-of-a-kind houses, you never wouldbelieve what can be done by setting the modules on foundations in one or two days. The largest home in the book was delivered in 15 modules, but most are much smaller.

Lest you think modular prefab homes only are for low-income housing, the architect of the 40,000-square-foot Xanadu house for Bill and Melinda Gates in Seattle, James Cutler, now designs prefab custom homes for Lindal Cedar Homes.

If this book has a fault — and it is very difficult to find one — it would be the heavy emphasis on prefab log construction. As I was enjoying the book, I suddenly realized it had turned into a book about log homes. Fortunately, the book then took an abrupt shift to concrete prefab homes, describing all their special features.

There even is a section about prefabricated steel frames, although such homes are in a minority, probably due to the difficulty finding qualified local contractors to assemble them on site. Frankly, although steel houses offer many advantages, they are unique and you either love them or don’t.

Although I’ve been involved with old and new houses for many years, I was not familiar with the term SIP, which stands for “structural insulated panels.” They are precut panels used as wall, floor or roof components consisting of panels bonded to an insulating foam core.

The primary SIP advantages are fast assembly and energy efficiency for the outer walls, thus requiring smaller heating and cooling units. SIP walls provide an R-value of 46, even before drywall and stucco are added.

This ultra-complete book not only shows the many varieties of prefab homes available, but the author has done an admirable job of educating readers about what they need to know, such as explaining photovoltaic cells mounted on roofs to provide electricity and how to use reclaimed wood in log homes.

If you are considering building your home on a lot you already own or want to acquire, this book will open your eyes to show what can be done with prefab homes, which look like custom homes but cost a lot less. The many examples and explanations show what can be accomplished.

On my scale of one to 10, this superb book rates an off-the-chart 12.

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US Representative Tom Udall Requests Modular Homes

Udall Requests Modular Homes For Tornado Victims
By Associated Press
04/06/2007

CLOVIS, N.M. (AP) – US Representative Tom Udall has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide temporary housing for residents displaced by a string of tornadoes that hit eastern New Mexico last month.

The New Mexico Democrat tells the director of FEMA in a letter that there’s still a great need for housing.

Udall suggests that FEMA use some of the mobile homes left over from temporary communities set up after Hurricane Katrina.

Udall says providing temporary housing for eastern New Mexico residents is an important step to restoring normalcy to their lives.

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Pre-fab-ulous? Yes!!!

ONARCHITECTURE – Pre-fab-ulous? Builder does it the Swedish way
By DAVE MCNAIR
April 5, 2007

The architectural dream of churning out factory-built houses the way Henry Ford churned out Model-Ts is nothing new. In fact, the curator of Assembly Required: Contemporary Prefabricated Houses, a show in Richmond last year, described the “prefab” house as “modern architecture’s oldest new idea.”

Indeed, Sears, Roebuck & Co. started its Houses by Mail program in 1908, and in the 1920s Buckminster Fuller introduced the futuristic precursor to his geodesic dome. Unfortunately (or fortunately for some), factory-built house designs, at least in America, seem not to have escaped the architect’s studio, and when they did, it was to create what Americans have learned to associate with the term “prefabrication”– double-wides, or the cheap manufactured contraptions seen sailing down interstates behind “oversize load” signs.

In the last decade, so-called modular and panelized houses have gained wider acceptance. Indeed, we’ve chronicled their development in these pages, showcasing the UVA architecture department’s successful ecoMod project, the growing use of factory-built SIPS panels, and most recently a factory-built ThermaSteel house ["Man of steel: Scouten touts new technology," March 8].

However, despite the success of these technologies, the stigma associated with prefab houses persists.

For example, when architect Alan Scouten built his house in Ivy of ThermaSteel, a combination of steel and styrofoam that has proven strong enough to withstand hurricane winds and provides superior insulation, a neighbor attempted to sue him because he believed the house was going to lower property values.

According to Swedish builder Per Sjolinder, that prejudice against prefab houses is uniquely American. In countries like Sweden and Japan, he says, prefabrication is the rule, not the exception.

“In Sweden, we have been building prefab houses on a large scale for 75 years, and today over 90 percent of all homes in the country are put together in a factory,” Sjolinder says, adding that factory-built houses have become a way to increase energy efficiency in a cold climate and lower housing prices in a country of high labor costs.

Indeed, as far back as 1985, The New York Times was touting Swedish mastery of the prefab house. At a development in the Hamptons, 50 Swedish “kit” houses went up in as many days, 1/50 of the time needed to build comparable stick-built houses. The combination of craftsmanship and technology impressed even a US government technology expert.

“The Swedes have basically taken the building craftsman and given him a lot of high-technology equipment,” Henry C. Kelly, a senior associate in the Office of Technological Assessment, told the Times. ”Essentially, they are hand-building a house, but doing it with high technology in a factory so they can do it quickly. There’s no question about the quality.”

On a beautiful hillside in Ivy, Sjolinder and his company, EuroHomes USA, are building two model houses– one 2,300 square feet and the other a whopping 6,200 square feet– that he hopes will showcase the best of what Swedish (and American, he points out) innovation has to offer. In addition, the ambitious Swede wants to create America’s first prefab factory operation building Swedish “closed-wall” panel houses. Eventually, Sjolinder says, he hopes to produce 500 to 1,000 homes a year.

As Sjolinder explains, closed-wall systems are much different from the panelized or modular construction most Americans are familiar with. In addition to being completely customized, the walls of both houses arrive with everything in them: windows, doors, electric and plumbing hook-ups, switches, hardware, any electronics, and even the exterior wall covering. Sjolinder says that once the design and components of a wall are chosen, 35 to 40 of them can be built in his factory in several hours, enough to construct the shell of his 2,300-square-foot model, which took only a day to raise.

Touring the unfinished houses, it’s virtually impossible to tell their components were manufactured in a factory. In fact, on close inspection, the walls reveal innovative details and materials. For example, instead of the wood shims normally found around a door casing to make it square, a standard practice in stick-built construction, adjustable bolts hidden in the door casing secure it to the frame, making it easier to adjust if the door becomes unaligned. Window sills can never rot because they are polished stone, and the Swedish-made triple-pane windows open and flip around ingeniously.

And, of course, since the electric and plumbing are already installed (inspections for both take place before the wall panels are delivered), there’s minimal subcontracting work involved. Still, Sjolinder points out that craftsmen are important to the process of piecing the house together and adding various details.

We also took note of the wall construction, which at first looked like a standard stick-built wall. Apparently, after years of using SIPS panel and other similar technologies, which have only begun to gain acceptance in the US, the Swedish building industry realized that they actually cause health problems.

“The houses we made were sometimes so ‘tight’ that moisture couldn’t go anywhere,” says Sjolinder. “And so we had problems with mold. People were getting sick. In Sweden, they tried to use machines to suck the air in and out, but they were often very expensive and added an air pressure to the inside of the house that wasn’t natural.”

The solution, he says, was to create a four-layer “breathing wall” encased in a thick Gore-Tex panel. Functioning much like the popular Gore-Tex jackets athletes love because they’re light, warm, and breathable, the walls provide the same kind of superior insulation that SIPS panels do, without trapping air inside the house. In fact, Sjolinder claims it should cost only $125 to $150 a month to heat and cool the 6,200-square-foot house.

From room to room, unusual details continue to catch the eye: drawers that cleverly require a post-toddler’s strength to open, hidden latches on doors to keep them from slamming shut, radiant heat beneath the basement floor to control moisture, “whispering floor” panels to block the sound of stomping feet, European-style gas water heaters that heat water as it passes through the system, and a stairway and ceiling posts milled from poplar trees on the property.

At the end of April, Sjolinder says, he’ll hold the first of several open houses to showcase his prefab models.

So might these models finally change American attitudes about factory built houses? If the excitement Sjolinder displays as he shows the house is any indication, it may not matter to him.

“I’ve been thinking about and planning this for nine years,” he says. “And I still think it’s fun.”

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