Modular homes have gone from affordable housing to chic digs.
BY D. HEIMPEL
 Most people are used to going into an auto dealership and choosing options on a car, but doing the same for a house? You got it. With low-cost, high-speed construction and all the refinements of a standard home, the notion of buying a pre-built abode and tricking it out is increasingly popular.
“America is just a little bit behind the rest of the world,” says John Rose, CEO of Modular-Experts. com, one of California’s leading modular home distributors. “In Sweden, the largest home maker is IKEA.
In Japan, it’s Toyota and Panasonic. Everywhere where modular homes are, they take over the market.”
For Sean McKeon, a newlywed high-school teacher, buying a modular home was a way to exchange a Hollywood rental apartment for a real home to start a family.
 “A modular home is the only way we can aff ord anything in the LA market right now, outside of a 700-square-foot, one-bedroom condo somewhere,” McKeon says.
But these days, modulars are more than just aff ordable homes. “I can design my dream house, and actually aff ord it,” McKeon says. Some companies have turned it up a notch, making modular homes into high-tech, high-end green havens.
Rose recently sold a home for $1.2 million. It was a 6,500-square-foot mini-mansion with granite floors, top-range appliances and porcelain tiling.
The house was built in a neighborhood where the average price was $4 million or above. With construction costs for such a home coming in at $185 per square foot versus the $250 for an on-site construction, it is a no-brainer why more people are going modular.
 But the phenomenon isn’t only limited to houses. In Seattle, real estate developer Unico Properties unveiled a prototype project of apartments that can be fit together like Legos and stacked into as many as 100 units. The prototype looks like a lunch box from the outside, but inside there are energy-efficient apartments with integrated heating, lighting and security systems. Theconstruction of Unico’s prototype project was quickly approved, manufactured and finished in little more than a month.
More than just quickly constructed, modular homes can be beautiful, sleek and efficient. In 2001, Michelle Kaufmann and her husband, Kevin, were fed up with trying to find a home in the San Francisco Bay area, opting instead to build their own.
 They called their first on-site-built, eco-friendly home the Glidehouse. It took 21 months from start to finish and cost $233 a square foot. When their friends saw the place, they asked for a duplicate for themselves. Michelle tapped into modular factories that had been overlooked by normal architects, and built her first carbon copy of the Glidehouse at $182 per square foot; the project was completed in 10 months. To date, Michelle Kaufmann Designs has a diverse range of 10 homes and communities. All are modern with angular lines, expansive rooms and large panes of glass to allow copious natural light.
“Since 2002, we have completed 20 homes and expect to have almost 100 completed homes by the end of the year,” says Rachel Woelke, MKD’s director of communications. “We are currently working with over 70 clients on single-family residences, multi-family and various special projects. Our goal is to have 10,000 homes built within the next 10 years.”
Along with increased speed and lowered cost, modular homes are also environmentally friendly.
Thirty percent of the waste in landfills comes from construction sites.
 With manufacturing streamlined in factories, MKD estimates that waste is cut by 50% to 75%. And Rose says that modular homes built in California are 10% to 15% more energy efficient than state regulations demand for site-built homes.
While the US is far from Europe or Asia when it comes to the construction and popularity of modular homes, the building of such houses has increased dramatically. In 2007, First Lady Laura Bush even visited the Glidehouse in support of modular construction. “Sooner or later, everyone will be living in a modular home,” says Rose, who sells about 10 homes a month.
All of this means more and more people will be able to build their dream home without straining their finances—or the environment.
BY THE NUMBERS
This article is from
http://airtranmagazine.com/contents/2008/01/customized-construction/ |
