Manufactured Houses

ALLISON ARIEFF wrote the book "Prefab" in 2002, chronicling the history of prefabricated houses and mapping the possible future of environmentally responsible modular home design and fabrication. "When I told people what I was doing, they giggled," says Arieff, one of the founders of Dwell and formerly the magazine's editor. "Like, why would anybody write a book on this really mundane ugly architecture?" Since then, the laughable increasingly has become laudable.

Architectural writer and music critic Thomas Small, 49, and wife Joanna Brody, 44, a public relations consultant, had outgrown their two-bedroom town house in Santa Monica. So in 2004, they bought a "decrepit" Culver City cottage to remodel.

It's an appealing idea: Order a prefabricated steel building, have it shipped to your home, bolt it together with a few buddies over a weekend -- and save over traditional construction. Many people have purchased a garage, barn or workshop from one of the nation's numerous sellers of such buy-and-build products with this scenario in mind. But, says John Knight, founder of Santa Clarita-based Knight Building Systems, some Southlanders end up disappointed.

When Buster Keaton gets a build-it-yourself house in the 1920 short "One Week," he winds up spending seven days constructing a pieced-together dwelling with windows askew and a pitched roof that looks tipsy. Prefab has come a long way since then. If you have about 700 square feet and $223,000 to spare, you can order a smart guesthouse or office from L.A. architects Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner.

In a dusty field on the outskirts of China's capital, Fan Zhi has built the American dream. The two-bedroom cottage comes with a front porch. The rocking chair is not included. By capturing the attention of Americans weary of high heating bills and soaring construction costs, Fan hopes to turn this prefab home into the McBungalow of the home-building world.

A massive tractor-trailer whined in first gear Friday as it pulled a 48-ton house off a barge and onto a remote Santa Catalina Island pier, nearly completing a herculean effort by movers who improvised to overcome tidal flows, equipment failures and other unexpected obstacles.

IF Jennifer Siegal has her way, new homes won't be constructed anymore. They'll be installed. That's the philosophy behind her recently completed Venice SwellHouse, a 3,130-square-foot, two-story residence assembled out of prefabricated structural insulated panels, or SIPs. The panels forming the walls, floors and ceilings were trucked in pre-cut, cored for wiring or plumbing, and numbered -- ready to be snapped together and attached to the steel frame.

SHORTLY after Craig and Kim Proctor moved into their Monrovia house in 1993, they discovered the original blueprints for their two-story 1926 Tudor. Much to their surprise, they learned they were living in a house built from a kit. Craig turned to the Web and learned that the classy oak floors downstairs, the gleaming Douglas fir floors upstairs, the charming built-ins and the sconces in every room all came as part of a do-it-yourself kit ordered from a Pacific Ready-Cut Homes catalog.

The two-story house that Jennie Vasquez purchased in Oxnard this year wasn't what she expected at first glance. It appeared to be a narrow stick-frame house, one of four identical units that seemed to pop up overnight in a quaint downtown neighborhood. It had three bedrooms, a detached garage with an alley entrance and a backyard surrounded by a white picket fence. Surely, she thought, the price tag would be beyond her $400,000 budget.

Jennifer Siegal's stomach is grumbling, which is causing audio problems for a TV crew that has invaded her sunny Venice office. "We've got an anomaly!" the sound guy shouts. Siegal, a 39-year-old designer, has already been answering a producer's questions for an hour. She sits in a vintage Steelcase desk chair and fiddles impatiently with her mike. "TV is incredibly weird," she says. She should know.