Nancy Hanover and Gerardo Reyes had already obtained permits to add a conventional bedroom/retreat to their 1923 Mid-City bungalow when they happened to read a newspaper article last spring about a cutting-edge prefab called Glidehouse.
Taking its name from its gliding glass wall, the eco-friendly house, designed by San Francisco architect Michelle Kaufmann, is made of 14-foot-wide factory-built modules that come with plumbing, wiring, storage and shoji-like wooden screens already in place.
Hanover and Reyes, both elementary schoolteachers who say they are Modernists at heart, loved the "economical beauty" of its design, at a price -- about $200 a square foot -- they could afford. "We're very interested in spaces, but we are also working people," Hanover says. So they opted to do something unorthodox: build a 573-square-foot modern prefab add-on to their classic Craftsman-style house.
Today, dozens of architects and designers are experimenting with prefab, putting a decidedly hip new spin on manufactured housing.
When did prefab get cool, losing its nasty associations with double-wides and the ticky-tacky look-alike boxes of Levittown? Modern prefab housing has been popular in Europe for decades (increasingly so, thanks to IKEA and other sponsors), but the new surge in interest in the United States can be traced to January 2003. That's when San Francisco-based Dwell magazine announced a competition, inviting 16 architects and designers to design a forward-looking prefab house with a budget of no more than $200,000. This summer, the prototype of the winning Dwell Home, designed by Joseph Tanney and Robert Lutz of the New York firm of Resolution: 4 Architecture, was unveiled in Pittsboro, N.C.
"We ended up buying every bottle of water in the county," says Dwell Editor-in-Chief Allison Arieff, who expected 500 visitors at the sweltering site and got 2,500.
Huntington Beach's Michael Sylvester, an Australian-born architect and business consultant who created a website, www.fabprefab.com, sees prefab frenzy as a function of growing visual literacy in the U.S. Trained by exposure to beautiful modern objects, from the iPod to the reborn Volkswagen Beetle, people want reasonably priced houses that reflect their taste and reflect well on them.
