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The world of prefab and modular homes. |
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| http://andreasangelidakis.blogspot.com/2008/06/tube-prefabby-guy-dessauges.html |
Treehugger covered an historical, and quite unconventional, prefab:
Around 1960, Swiss artist Guy Dessauges wondered why we were so square. "The vault resists pressure much larger than the flat ceiling. For the same quality of materials. I wondered why we could not use the cylinder to build a home. The only problem was the diameter of the cylinder. It was necessary to have a diameter large enough to install two floors. The idea crystallized in ten minutes."*
Inhabitat's Prefab Friday loved the photos of the 
Flatpak House we've seen before.
The LVL home tour received some good coverage this week. The blog "the girl in the green dress" wrote:
the lvl open house in maine was a success with about 100 people visiting my friend jim's house.
She also took some photos that were picked up by Jetson Green and Materialicio.us.
Curbed LA provided a photo update of a Marmol Radziner home going up in Venice, CA:
last we heard, the home, which belongs to firm founder Leo Marmol, will be done in about a month.
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| rocioromero.com |
Rocio Romero has
announced
the second stop on her national home tour. We've
discussed
the tour before; here's your second chance to see an LV
Series home in person.
...the next stop on our National LV Open House Tour is Eliot, Maine on Saturday, June 14, 2008. This event is the second of four that will be held throughout the country.The 2008 National Tour will provide attendees the opportunity to see and experience the LV space. Ms. Romero, her staff, homeowners, and general contractors will be present to discuss LV design features, custom design options, the build process, and construction costs.
Some details on the tour format:
A chartered coach will transport attendees to the LVL Open House tour site at the scheduled tour time. It is a five-minute bus drive, followed by a short one block walk from the bus to the home. Once you arrive at the LVL home, you will tour the exterior and interior home and view a video presentation of the assembly of one of our latest LV builds and several LV homes that highlight customization options. This presentation is advanced LV information, so we encourage you to read all of our LVS Brochures. After the tour and presentation there will be a Q&A session. The bus will then depart 1.5 hours after the scheduled tour time.
You can register for the event online.
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| gallery.apartmenttherapy.com/photo/012408romerotour/_slide_ |
Apartment Therapy Chicago covers an LV Home in Eliot, Maine:
When James and Rui were ready to build on their lakefront land, they contacted architect Rocio Romero. The Missouri-based designer is well known for her minimalist prefab homes, which arrive flat-packed and can go up in a few months' time. James and Rui worked with Rocio to develop a standard LV Home (Rocio's trademark design) with a custom interior that would make the most of their incredible natural surroundings. The highlight of this home is definitely the views....
Read the post for more details or go directly to the slideshow (16 images).
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| rocioromero.com |
Via Inhabitat on Feb. 29:
To date, more than 110 LV prefabs have become home to owners throughout 23 states in the US, with 40 more under construction. While prefab fans have been able to tour the Rocio Romero show home in Missouri for several years, this weekend marks the first time that a finished LV is available for viewing in New York. The first National LV Open House Tour kicks off on March 1st (tomorrow!) in the Hudson Valley!
Sorry that we posted too late for the New York open house, but there will be more! The Rocio Romero site fills in the blanks:
This event is one of four that will be held throughout the country. The 2008 National Tour will provide attendees the opportunity to see and feel the LV space. Ms. Romero, Rocio Romero staff, homeowners, and general contractors will be present to discuss the LV design features, custom design options, the build process, and construction costs. Since 2003, more than 6,000 individuals have visited the Rocio Romero show home in Perryville, Missouri. Our new national tours will allow attendees to view our newest homes and experience the wide array of customization and lifestyles available to LV home owners.
The open house featured four pre-reserved time slots, costing $40/person. We'll do our best to get the dates for the other three events with plenty of advance notice.
We covered many informative websites on prefab and modular homes last year. A few of our favorite posts:
In May, we found the
LV Series Yahoo! Group, a great resource on Rocio Romero's LV Series homes
We wrote about
Nashville Modern Prefab in June. The plan: to build a Hive Modular home. Sadly, it looks like work has stalled.
- Shedworking entered our radar at the end of June. The blog is a great source of information on small prefab homes.
We love
A Prefab Project, which tracks the progress of a Resolution: 4 Architecture home in West Virginia. In July, we watched the home being delivered.
Also in July:
Hive Modular started a blog.
Sears Homes were some of the earliest prefabs. We were excited when we found a great resource on the homes: the
Sears Archives.
I'd forgotten about this one: we covered a great Flickr set of a
Flatpack House going up. Now the home is much more complete.
In December, we came across
ModularHomeChoice.com. It offers some useful information about building a modular home.
And we saw
Secret Fortress Hideout, a blog all about the construction of an LVL Home.
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| secretfortresshideout.blogspot.com/ |
While visiting the LV Home Fans Yahoo! group the other day, I happened upon a site I hadn't seen before, Secret Fortress Hideout:
This blog documents the progress of our super-cool, pre-fab home "somewhere" in the wilds of Northwest Arkansas. Rocio Romero designed the home, model LVL, and incorporated our custom modifications.
Recent posts have covered insulation, lighting design, and construction delays:
A few critical path items jumped the track and will push us back about a week.
The stainless kitchen cabinets we ordered from Lasertron will be delayed due to an email mixup.
The heat won't be connected for two weeks, which delays the floor installation.
We found out cultured marble won't work for the tub or bathroom sinks and devised a Plan B (Neptune Zen Soaker Tub and custom-fabricated under-mount stainless trough sinks).
And, last, but not least, the company Don scheduled to prime the drywall bumped us a week.
I guess these things happen in building. It's just wild that they all happened in the last two days.
Like A Prefab Project, Secret Fortress Hideout provides a great first-hand look at the construction of a prefab home.
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| marmolradzinerprefab.com |
The Good Human's Prefab Wednesday enjoys the designs from Marmol Radziner Prefab, but wants something affordable:
"I would really like to see an affordable, attractive and modern prefab house come on to the market. As much as I love all these designs, the price just puts it outside the realm of possibility for us and most other people."
A blog called cobalt_blue praises prefab and the LV Series from Rocio Romero:
"Years ago, I had no concept of the words 'prefab housing' meant. I thought that it was a fancy euphemism for what we call a trailer home, or doublewide. This is until I had heard the words 'Rocio Romero' and the 'LV Home' mentioned in an article."Read the whole thing (875 words).
Collin Dunn unleashes the snark (and wild exaggeration, e.g. "99.99%") on Treehugger's blog at the Sundance Channel, with several links to prefab coverage on Treehugger.com.
Inhabitat's Prefab Friday covers the perrinepod, which we'll look at in more detail shortly.
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One year ago, Kiplinger's Personal Finance featured an article on Fabulous Prefabs.
The article details homeowners Scott and Lisa McGlasson's decision to purchase an Alchemy Architects' weeHouse as a summer home for a lot they own in Minnesota:
The McGlassons' hideaway -- with two bedrooms, one bathroom and tons of personality -- is a prefabricated home. The components were assembled in a factory, trucked to their lot and put together....
Scott and Lisa paid $95,000 for their second home. They chose the layout of the first story from a half-dozen of Alchemy Architects' plans and added a second story to the blueprints, expanding the size to 780 square feet. The firm hired a Wisconsin factory to manufacture the house's components, a process that took about six weeks. The components were trucked from the factory on a flatbed, and a crane helped assemble them (delivery and crane costs ran $6,000). The McGlassons hired contractors to connect the house's wiring to the electrical grid, dig a well and do other finishing work. The final tally was about $160,000, including fixtures and appliances."
The flexibility of a panelized house makes it superior for building on mountain, beach and lakefront locations, which tend to have more quirks than the typical suburban lot....
The major limitation of modular houses is size: Modular units must be able to travel down highways. 'We have to do a lot of thinking within the box,' jokes Joseph Tanney, a partner at Resolution: 4 Architecture, a New York firm that builds prefab homes using modular and other methods. What's more, modular houses often need thicker-than-usual interior walls to ensure that they will withstand the stress of being lifted onto your lot by a crane. (Panelized homes don't face this problem.) These thicker walls reduce the number of floor plans because there are only so many ways the fatter walls can be disguised."
•
Empyrean•
Alchemy Architects•
OMD•
CleverHomes•
Lazor Office•
EcoSteel (aka EcoContempo)•
Taalman Koch•
Resolution: 4 Architecture•
MKD•
Rocio Romero.
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| dwell.com |
At Home St. Louis features an article on Rocio Romero and her LV Series this month:
One thing that should kick up the ticker is the fact that LV buyers are now buying more than one unit and putting them together. Ms. Romero and staff customize the design for every house — doing site plans, moving walls, enlarging baths and closets, converting bedrooms into exercise rooms, home theaters, offices — whatever the owner wants....And for those who find one LV a bit too confining, she has a two-story version on her drafting board."
(Hat tip: Jetson Green)
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| www.napaprefab.com |
The owners of an LV Series home built in Napa Valley, California are offering tours. And, for those of you who might be seriously considering an LV Series home, you can even rent out the place for a weekend.
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| walkerart.org |
The Some Assembly Required exhibit by the Walker Art Center will be opening at the Virginia Center for Architecture on June 15. (Hat tip: a post on Richmond Magazine's blog).
Tour locations to date:
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, Minnesota
December 8, 2005-March 26, 2006
Vancouver Art Gallery
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
April 29- September 4, 2006
Yale School of Architecture
New Haven, Connecticut
October 27, 2006- February 2, 2007
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Pacific Design Center
Los Angeles, California
February 28- May 20, 2007
(our coverage links to a video report)
Marmol Radziner, FlatPak by Lazor Office, LV Series Homes by Rocio Romero, Mountain Retreat by Resolution 4: Architecture, Sunset Breezehouse by Michelle Kaufmann Designs, Turbulence House by Stephen Holl, and the weeHouse by Alchemy Architects
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| © Jennifer Watson |
I just found a Yahoo! Group dedicated to sharing the thoughts and experiences of LV Series homeowners. LV Series homeowner Gregg started the group in July of 2005:
The reason I am starting this group is because I have had a lot of questions during this process to which I could not find answers on the web -- the most notable example being the actual cost....I felt it would be a good idea to have a forum for people interested in the home to be able to ask around."
Foundation: +3300 Framing and roof: +5000 Heat, Plumbing, Elec: +1500 Interior Finish: +400
...It fell very close to Rocio's estimate, and I am in one of the most expensive areas of the country."
One user, having just finished his LV Home posted a full recap of construction costs, photos and thoughts on the project:
"Note that we did not encounter any big problems during construction. I will say that we were not pleased at all with the costs and do blame our contractor for a lot of the cost madness. But when we solicited bids more than one builder said, "kit or no kits, the cost per square foot will be the same." And that bore out to be true."
If you want to build an LV home, this is definitely a must-visit site.
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| © Richard Sprengler |
Rocio Romero was not present at CA Boom 4, but she and her team run a serious prefab operation. I spoke with Donna Rosanswank, Sales Manager, on the phone last week. 35 LV Series homes have been completed from the 100 LV Series kits sold since operations began in 2003. Many homes are built from more than one kit, and some projects have been delayed. Sales are doubling every year and they will expand into Canada by early next year.
The LV series includes:
design:
• standard or customized floorplan (extra $ for custom design time)
• full set of construction documents (exceeds UBC and IRC requirements)
• list of materials, product specifications, and a construction schedule to help your local contractor realize your project
• a binder listing all of the suppliers used to build the original show home; this will help homeowners source materials that are not included in the kit
materials shipped with the kit:
• exterior wall panels
• structural components for floor and roof
• exterior siding
materials that are NOT included:
• interior framing materials
• interior finishes
• windows and doors
• fixtures (plumbing and lighting)
• roofing
The home kits include so few finish materials because "Rocio wanted to be able to fit the whole kit in one flatbed delivery," and to allow customers flexibility in the final product.
