Word: prefabs
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Forget boxes on wheels and tacky subdivisions. Prefab is now just plain fab. Once the poor stepchild of residential construction, so-called systems-built housing is now the province of topflight architects, who are reinventing the genre with innovative designs, new building components and environmentally friendly approaches. In September, Lindal (2003 sales: $50 million) begins offering two versions of the Graves-designed kit house on its website, where it already sells a prefab home created by James Cutler, the architect behind the home of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. New Jersey architect-cum-performance artist Adam Kalkin is taking orders...
Inspired by the Sears, Roebuck mail-order homes that sprang up in the early 1900s, "designer prefab" spans a number of highly nuanced--and often confounding--housing categories. Variously described as systems-built, modular, panelized, kit or manufactured, prefab homes are constructed at least partially in factories before being transported to building sites. There they can be assembled quickly, sometimes in a matter of days. While most of the new-age houses in a box have yet to be mass-produced, an expected rise in interest rates and a public hungry to meld good design with low cost will make...
...those avoiding prefab tunes, there's Xingtone, a $15 software program that lets users record unique ringer sounds, from a child's song to a dog's bark...
Most customers for the prefab meals are women. A few men show up, some with their wives as a date night. Then there are the people making meals for their elderly parents or college students looking to restock their refrigerators. Taste and convenience are the main draws. Says Laurie Stoltenberg, 40, of suburban Minneapolis, a mother of three with her own jewelry-bead business and a monthly customer of Let's Dish: "I like the idea that I'm putting a meal on the table that looks like I'm cooking from scratch--which I did, only not that night...
...number of rooms or the amount of open space the client wants." Her hope right now is that the Swellhouse designs will build for about $200 per sq. ft. But as factory systems for mass-producing house parts improve, she expects costs to come down in all kinds of prefab production. And that could mean a new world of truly affordable dwellings. "If we can come down to the range of $60 a sq. ft.," she says, "we can change the whole face of housing...