On a remote home-building site outside the small town of Charlestown, R.I., Tom Dieterich is up on a roof, ducking beneath a massive slab of wood and steel that hangs from a crane. The craggy-faced crew foreman from Blu Homes has been riding his workers hard to finish this house, since they’re already so close: The bamboo floors are down, the foam-insulated walls are up, even the energy-efficient kitchen appliances have been installed. Now, with dusk approaching, Dieterich is anxious to fix the final segment of the roof into place. After all, he and his crew—and one of our reporters—are putting up the house in a single day.
Actually, not quite a day. But in less time than it takes most men to sprout a patch of chin stubble, this 836-square-foot structure, built and assembled largely in a Massachusetts factory, was lowered onto its foundation and nearly completed. “We’ll lay the other half of the floor and wrap up other minor finish work later,” Dieterich says.
For most people, the idea of factory-made homes conjures images of tacky, vinyl-sided shoeboxes on wheels. But boutique manufacturers like Blu and others are working to erase the lowbrow stigma with a new breed of prefabs that are hipper (hey, Brad Pitt’s nonprofit is building them in New Orleans!), more high-end (prices can run up to $3 million) and, above all, aggressively green.
The premier modular project by California firm LivingHomes was the first American residential structure to receive LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum certification, the highest eco-badge offered by the U.S. Green Building Council. Even the nation’s biggest factory-home stalwarts, All American Homes [COHM]and Warren Buffett’s Clayton Homes, now tout their sustainable options like solar panels and nontoxic paints. “Everyone is so interested in green,” says Roberta Feldman, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “That might remove the stigma itself.”
To be sure, not many Americans will watch their houses appear in a single day, and modular homes still represent a small percentage of new-residential construction. But experts say the segment is just the latest sign of renewed interest in modestly scaled living. Traditional builders like KB Home and Pulte Homes say the square-footage gold-rush days are on the wane, as their buyers seek smaller abodes; according to the National Association of Home Builders, the average square footage of new homes dropped 5.3 percent from 2007 to 2009. Certainly, much of the downsizing impulse comes from crash-sobered homebuyers nursing McMansion hangovers. But experts say the call for less-cavernous living spaces has also been driven by demographic trends like falling birth rates and a rise in unmarried homeowners. According to the National Association of Realtors, the number of single homebuyers in the U.S. jumped 41 percent between 2001 and 2009.
Then, of course, there’s the growing slow-economy drumbeat for all things energy-efficient. In a recent survey by McGraw-Hill Construction, 70 percent of future home-buyers said they’d be inclined to buy a green house in a down market. And when it comes to prefab, the budgetary appeal goes beyond long-term energy savings: Green modular designs generally sell for $150 to $300 a square foot, while custom-built green homes can cost up to 20 percent more. Some prefab builders say their manufacturing efficiencies can minimize the usual eco-friendly price premium, allowing homeowners to reap immediate savings. “Green and affordable don’t normally go together,” says Lorraine Day, owner of the new Charles-town modular. “Here, they do
Gone are the days when all prefabricated houses looked like drab vinyl shoeboxes, traveling down the highway with a “Wide Load” banner across the back. Thanks to new eco-friendly designs, modular homes are being given a green, highbrow makeover that cost up to 20 percent less than similarly appointed custom-built abodes. Our reporter dons a hard hat, grabs a drill and helps build one in rural Rhode Island—in only nine hours
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