During Christmas, I was in the airport waiting for my flight and decided to pop into a store to grab some reading material.  Much to my surprise, this was December you know, the February issue of Dwell was already up and it popped right out at me.  On the stands right now is “The Prefab Issue: Real Homes for Real People,” and it’s definitely worth reading.  In addition to an essay from founding editor-in-chief Karrie Jacobs, here are a few prefabs you can expect to read about in this issue:

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The Galleries at Turney, although completed back in mid-2007, have been getting some good press over the last year for good reason.  First, they're ultra modern, super slick, and hard to miss.  Second, the eight homes were the first to receive LEED-H certification in the entire state of Arizona.  Third, all eight detached units, as of about December 2008, have sold out.  They're gone, which means smartly designed, modern, somewhat luxurious homes can sell, even in a tough real estate market. 

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5/3/09 update: Clayton Homes launched the i-house!

When a friend first shot me a link to an article about this i-house, I knew we had to feature it.  This is a new, modern, green home designed and soon-to-be offered by Clayton Homes, the largest manufacturer of manufactured housing in the U.S.  Clayton Homes started in 1934, smack dab in the tough years of the Great Depression, and since that time, they've sold ~1.5 million homes.  If everything goes as planned with the i-house, Clayton Homes would like to be selling 2000 i-houses per year within 18 months of launching sales in May or so of this year. 

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About a year ago, we showed some renderings of Orchid Street Cityhomes, and it turns out, the homes are now finished.  Matter of fact, they’ve won a Root Award in Portland Spaces‘ inaugural design competition.  Well deserved, I believe.  Orchid Cityhomes is a duplex, or connected rowhouses, but the party wall is the garage, so the homes maintain a level of privacy and separation that’s usually missing in most attached residences.  They were designed and developed by Building Arts Workshop and both dwellings just received LEED Platinum certification about a week before Christmas.  Some of the green amenities include:

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When we last brought news of BrightBuilt Barn in September, it was only partially constructed.  Now it's all built and looks quite good.  Its trademark feature is the exterior LED lightskirt, which was designed to change color depending on the home's energy use.  GREEN means the BrightBuilt Barn is generating more energy than it consumes; YELLOW indicates a borderline condition; and RED means the energy usage is higher than required to meet the yearly net energy goal.  And like the lightskirt, everything about this home has been planned with meticulous care to create a livable, sustainable, replicable, flexible, and educational net-zero energy home.

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