Lately I've been featuring a lot of stuff from Etsy. Besides just being a great technology based website, Etsy has a lot of other things going for them. In fact, I think that we here at GRM share a common goal with them. Supporting the artist and makers at a grassroots level. By taking out the middle man, prices are down and creativity is up.This weeks Etsy find is Minerva Orduno, an architect-in-training, interior designer, budding photographer and jeweler. Minerva has a good eye and has some great prints on sale for a good price. $15 gets you a high quality print and the satisfaction of knowing you are helping someone live their dream.

Minerva Orduno at Etsy.

Prefab has long since made big promises of bringing affordable design to the masses. With sites like Live Modern® dedicated to affordable housing its obvious that there is definitely a huge client base just waiting. While us Americans may be a little slow to provide results, it looks like there may be some action from the land down under. Australian based PreBuilt has a new series of houses reportedly priced from $43,000 - $109,000 USD. Now thats more like it. You can see by the pictures after the jump, that the interiors are even well done. Seems like those Aussie's have a way better sense for good design than we do anyways. Maybe we should just all move to Australia and live in a Prebuilt house.

Via Inhabitat

For those of you looking for a little bit of inspiration on how to tackle the whole affordable/modern conundrum, there is some new help from Taunton Press available. Its called Good House, Cheap House: Adventures in Creating an Extraordinary Home at an Ordinary Price, and it is written by Kira Obolensky who is a playwright with a passion for modern houses. The book covers 27 different houses with one thing in common, they are all built by people who crave nice modern design, but can't afford to shell out the typical modern prices. I haven't read it yet, but it looks like it has gotten some good reviews, and has some good tips in it. My favorite was using sliding glass doors for large, inexpensive, operable windows. Definitely have to check that idea out. So if you are writing a book for the budget conscious, it can't cost a fortune right? Well $16 for a hardback sounds about right to me. Check it out, and let us know what you think.

Now don't get me wrong, I am as big a fan of Dwell Magazine as the next guy, but their newest prefab venture with Empyrean (makers of the Deck House and Acorn House) has me wondering if we are really on the same page when it comes to defining "affordable". When Dwell launced its first Dwell Home Design Invitational in 2003, the challenge was to design a prefab house for under $200,000. The point of the whole contest was to show that prefab was a potential means for making modern housing affordable to the masses, and it was largely succesful. The winning Resolution 4 Dwell home, came in slightly over budget, but ended around $100 a square foot. Now just two years latter, Dwell has anounced its partnership with Empyrean and a new Dwell branded prefab product. The Dwell homes by Empyrean. Their latest issue manages to slip in some free advertising in the Editors Note announcing

"...not one but three beautifully designed, highly functional, and eminently livable modern prefab homes."

At least they didn't try and slip "afforable" in there. Because if you are looking for that $100 a square foot mark that Res 4 hit, your looking in the wrong place. Later in the magazine they have a full page ad that reads.

"3 Great Modern Prefab Designs All Under $250/square foot. Want to learn more?"

We would love to. The three houses featured are Res 4's Dwell home, Charlie Lazors FlatPak home, and a new house by Empyrean called the next house. All three of them are manufactured at Empyrean's 300,000 square foot manufacturing plant in Acton, Massachusetts. The sizes range from about 2,500 square feet (Next House and Res 4) to just over 3,000 square feet (FlatPak). So, what do they cost you ask? Well , according to their website:

"The general range of prices for a typical 2500 square foot Dwell home will be in the $175-$250 per square foot range, including architects fees, our components, on site construction costs, and finishes."

Let me help you with the math there. That puts the cheapest of the homes at around $437,500 and the most expensive at $750,000! I think it is fair to say that 1/2 million to 3/4 a million is not affordable to most of us. Now, I'm not trying to be negative here. I am sure there are a lot of great things that will come of this. The fact that Dwell was able to get three great designers together with one of the largest prefab builders in the nation is no small feat. It just appears that it may be some time yet before prefab delivers with its promise to make modernism affordable.

We want to know what you think. Drop by our Forums and let us know what you think about the promise of prefab.

Technology never ceases to amaze me. Right now my wife and I are on the small island of Panglao, just off of Bohol in the Philippines. We are enjoying beautiful beaches, amazing diving, and lots of visiting with the people.Most of our trip has been spent visiting friends in Cebu. In the Philippines most of the people don't have a lot of money, so you can imagine modern architecture and design is not a hot topic. I have however been admiring the DIY style of housing here. For our transportation we have been riding around on tricycles, which are old motorcycles with elaborate sidecars. They cram the people on them, sometimes as many as 9 per tricycle, which leaves me riding on the roof of the sidecar. If that makes no sense, just wait for the pictures to come. Speaking of pictures I have taken a lot, some of them of the Guerrilla Architecture I alluded to before. Pictures to come. I will be getting back into the states this Sunday, so look forward to a flury of new posts next week, including an exclusive interview with MAKR.

For those of you lucky enough to live close to CA Boom II I hope you had a chance to check out the Modern Shed by Grey Design. It is a very well designed shed/studio that makes that small back yard addition a reality. The 120 sqft studio is priced at just over $10,000 before shipping. While that is not pocket change, it does work out to around $90 a sqft. Shipping I am sure is not cheap, but it could prove to be a great solution for those who need a small addition and are handy with a hammer. According to their website, it can be assembled by two people with basic building skills and very few tools over a weekend. I personally love the look of the materials that they use.

Thanks to MoCo Loco for the tip.