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I've really been enjoying the posts on A Prefab Project. Homeowners Chris and Sarah track the construction of their prefab home, designed by Resolution: 4 Architecture. One of the downsides of the modular building method is that modules are limited to a size that fits on a flatbed truck. Chris offers some perspective after a visit to the factory: "When we were first looking around at the different prefab options, we had no real perspective on what 14' wide or 16' wide would be like for the whole length of a house - those are both obviously fine dimensions for a single room, but how does it feel to have a whole house fit into that width?...yesterday it was reassuring to actually stand in ours and feel how open and comfortable the space is..." Resolution 4's 16' module width is fairly typical, e.g. Chris answered some user comments and questions by listing some of the finish and fixtures they chose. Their goal: "modest and genuinely cost effective (and of course largely unspectacular)". Another post compares photos of the actual modules in the factory and the renderings that Resolution 4 had provided to the homeowners in the design process. Last Monday, Chris relayed a funny story about his Grandpa's take on modernist design. |
To the modules though... The 16' and 14' widths for Hive and Alchemy (as all other stick modular - MKD, Res4 etc) is for total width and not the inside wall to wall width. So, on a 16' wide module you're looking at about 14.9' for a room width. Remember, these are 2x6 walls so they're thicker and you loose inside space as a result.
The modules of Marmol Radziner, OMD and Living Homes are another game all together. They're steel, and unlike stick modular, can be plunked down side by side with no wall between them.
Still, done right, some of the stick modular units can have large openings between modules that help to mitigate the limitations of the smaller widths.