Such a deal?

STEVE GLENN is a former high-tech executive in the midst of reinventing himself, at age 42, as a real estate developer. His company, Living Homes, specializes in prefabricated, environmentally friendly architecture. If you make your way to its debut project, a steel-framed house in Ocean Park designed by Ray Kappe, he'll greet you wearing shorts and sandals -- and his ambition on his sleeve.

The house is poised to reinvent how architecture is produced and marketed, Glenn says. It includes an "unprecedented" number of green-design features (a claim that William McDonough, Rafael Pelli and more than a few German and Scandinavian architects might dispute). He hired Kappe, a stalwart of Westside Modernism for four decades and a founder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, because he is the world's "greatest living architect."

Glenn is hardly the first person in real estate to see modesty as a sign of professional weakness. And Kappe's design for the two-story, 2,500-square-foot house, with its crisp wood-and-glass exterior and surprisingly complex interior spaces, is a selling point in its own right.

But the last thing the fledgling prefab movement needs at this point is aggressive marketing or more hype. What it needs is a reality check.

For nearly five years now, design-savvy consumers priced out of the raging housing market -- and that describes a lot of Americans these days, subscribing to Elle Decor and shopping at Design Within Reach while still writing a rent check each month -- have looked to an emerging group of prefab, or modular, designs as a possible ticket to home ownership. These aren't the cookie-cutter prefab buildings that dot the suburban landscape but a new breed of factory-built houses combining sleek, camera-ready design with the economies of mass production.

Their lineage can be traced to the Case Study architects of the 1940s and '50s, experimental polymaths such as Buckminster Fuller and the developer Joseph Eichler, all of whom sought to bring high-quality residential architecture to a broad public. Even Kappe himself, most ambitiously in an unbuilt scheme for a dorm at Sonoma State, has tried his hand at modular design.

Compared to traditional houses, the new prefabs can be built quickly, efficiently and inexpensively. Gaining enthusiastic coverage in pretty much every major newspaper and magazine in the country, and filling the message boards to bursting at fabprefab.com and other websites, they have proved wildly popular.