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The most beautiful prefab ever...
One of the most beautiful, flexible, and complex prefab systems we’ve covered in the last year is the Ray Kappe designed Living Home. For better and worse, it was covered this week in the LA Times by writer Christopher Hawthorne in the article “Such a deal?” Although he addressed several shortcomings that bother us about the current prefab industry, we can’t help but feel he cast a harsh light on prefabs in general based upon this high end model.
“…the last thing the fledgling prefab movement needs at this point is aggressive marketing or more hype. What it needs is a reality check.” –Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times
Yes, the Living Home is expensive. Look at it! I can’t believe it’s under $2 million; this is the Cadillac of current prefab designs. Don’t knock it on approachability and affordability, because that’s definitely not the target market which Kappe was designing for.
This “product” offers a beautiful, spacious, and quick move-in design for those with sophisticated modern tastes- and relatively deep pockets. There are many other prefab models in production that do provide a more affordable housing option. Tiny ones like the Weehouse, several designs by Michelle Kaufman, and the sub-$100,000 option by Rocio Romero are all good examples.
Certainly my cup of tea, except for the price tag...
Technorati Tags: design, prefab, architecture
Posted on August 4, 2006
in Design
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Comments (1)
Comments
I really like the idea of prefab houses because they're built really quick and everything from the placing of the electricity plug to the placing of the kitchen and sizes of rooms are thinked though by a specialed team (product developers?).
I really don't want to go through the hassle of traditional building with multiple contractors. It takes ages before it's finished (I'm impatient), there are too many parties involved and it's hard to keep everything on budget. And, you can't have a look into your house before it's finished.
The prefab concept has a bad image in Belgium. Most people think of ugly low-quality container-style houses when they hear about prefab. Maybe the prefab sector should introduce a new term to get rid of the bad karma prefab currently has.
Posted by Bart | August 4, 2006 11:29 AM