Affordable prefab comments
I received an interesting comment the other day on an old post called “Dwell homes…Prefabs empty promise?” It is from someone who is an early adopter and is currently building a nexthouse. It just shows that not everything is as good as it seems.
As an early adopter of NextHouse, I will say – with resolute conviction – that this is not “affordable” housing. I’m loving the house as it goes up, and it will be quite wonderful to live in in a few months, but it’s a pretty steep price. My rough calculation, based on current cost overruns to address design issues, is over $285/sq ft (we’ll be 3050 finished), and we already owned the land. The price does include demolition, but even still…
The big differentiator will be the builder. Our builder is great. But if someone hires a builder who doesn’t have experience with Empyrean designs and how this stuff builds out, or the engineering and geometry involved, there’s going to be a lot of trouble. The decks and roof will be different out of the gate for future nexthouses than for our own, and it’ll be based on what our builder saw that Empyrean didn’t.
The other big issue is that nobody seems to be ready to help people who are replacing existing houses to find good ways to reuse the existing materials. A lot of these new kit houses will go up as replacements. While the kit construction strikes me as less wasteful than site building, we’re still missing a big piece. We downcycled some of the stuff, which isn’t optimal, but better than the waste stream where the rest of it ended. The NextHouse roof system is probably the same as the old Deck Houses – filled with nails, so you can’t hardly reuse the mahogany ceilings and posts in a future building. And Dwell Magazine, with its focus on selling advertising of brand new products certainly isn’t doing anything to help its readers and the communities at large think about and solve this problem.
Just a random rant on a Sunday night….
Thanks Susan for sharing your thoughts and experiences.
Related posts:
Comments
3 Responses to “Affordable prefab comments”
Leave a Reply
Sponsors & Advertisers
-
Thanks for the heads up on the real costs and issues, I had just contacted Empyrean to start looking at their options, but I’ll pass on them now. I guess I had read “affordable” somewhere and thought that meant me!
If you look at what’s out on the modern prefab market right now you’re going to see a lot of upscale homes. Affordable often means affordable compared to a typical high end, architect designed modern house with many premium features. Also consider that a 3000 sq-ft house is a big house. You can still get a really nice house with great design and features at a good price, if you’re willing to build a little smaller. Smaller, by the way, is cheaper in the long run maintenance and energy use of a home too. Though be careful about cost per square foot figures as that number can be misleading. There are lots of fixed costs that don’t change with the size of the house, and the number of bathrooms and cost of the kitchen contribute a lot to that figure no matter how big the rest of the rooms are.
But there are some great modern prefabs out there that are a little more cost conscious. Try the LV House by Rocio Romero. And, as architect David Sarti shows us with his house in Seattle, an affordable modern home can be site built. Arkin-Tilt’s Mill Valley straw bale residence is a wonderful, sustainable home geared toward a budget, and you can buy the plans from Healthy Home Plans and build your own.
I guess the bottom line is keep looking. Nothing against Empyrean- the are great houses. But not everyone can afford even their smaller homes. But there are a lot of options out there, and I think you can find something great for a smaller budget.
Thanks for posting the initial comments in regards to the NextHouse.
John’s comments bring some older moderns to mind – mainly the early cetral utility core homes of Ralph Rapson and John Black Lee. I can’t help but look at these older homes and wonder if somewhere along the way a disconnect formed that to this day makes many modern homes unreachable. These early homes were REALLY simple. Even the early Nuetra’s were really simple and small. Most moderns today feature several ammenities that, although nice, work to drive the prices really high while not being all that terribly important. I’m rambling, but really simple unaplogetically modern homes like the LV are needed if affordable prefab is going to stick (there is even debate here in regards to the LV).