January 09, 2005
Modular Homes
3 garage, 5,000+ square feet homes seem to be the trend today for building and buying, but you don't necessarily need to buy a big home in order to find a luxury home. In fact, you might find quite a bit of luxury in a modular home, one that is pre-manufactured, then assembled on site. I know what you're thinking. Trailer home, no thank you.
"Pre-fab modern" is a housing style growing in popularity though, and for good reason. While not always cheaper than stick built, these homes tend to be energy efficient and fast to assemble. If you believe in helping out the environment, you might be interested to find that some designers are making homes out of those big recycled shipping containers. If you haven't checked out what's being made today, you might want to. This isn't your grandparent's mobile home.
Prefab Modern by Jill Herbers is an excellent coffee table style book with lots of information and lots of pictures.
If you're looking for online resources, a lot of these fresh new designs are still in the works, but here are a couple sites you may want to check out:
At the fabzone, you can see pictures and links to many of the modular homes in the works.
LOT-EK only has a temporary pages up at the time of this writing, but you can see an example of a home built using shipping containers on their front page.
Even if you're not ready to make the move from stick-built into shipping containers, one of these modular homes might make the perfect vacation home, especially if you already have the land staked out, but weren't sure what to do with it.
