This is the Castaway House, a renovation in Phoenix, Arizona that’s also the first project to be certified under the Phoenix Green Construction Code. The team* behind this Gold-certified project transformed an existing 1,000 square-foot, abandoned house originally built in 1951 into a cutting-edge, energy-efficient abode with 1,970 square feet, four bedrooms, and two bathrooms. Here’s a little more background.
A future homeowner inherits a chunk of land in Ulster County, New York and decides to put a dreamy modern prefab on it. I can understand that. The owner picks an LVL model home from Rocio Romero, and the kit costs $47,000, including such things as the plans, a construction binder, open wall panels, certain structural materials, and the exterior siding. The owner budgets just over $120,000 to finish the 1,669 square-foot home and hires a contractor to do the work, but that’s where things go wrong.
If you take all the benefits of prefab building, combine it with over twenty years of building experience, and mix in pure, relentless coolness, you might just find yourself buying a home from JET PreFab,* and having fun while you’re doing it.
Just in time for outdoor entertaining and BBQ, Loll Designs introduced a new line called the Fresh Air Collection derived from a flat-pack design for furniture originally intended to be shipped in a prefab, disaster-relief home. The home never materialized but that didn’t stop Loll from finishing their designs. The collection is made with paper-composite Richlite for structural bracing and recycled and recyclable HDPE (from milk jugs). Fresh Air includes a table at $760 and benches from $210.
A couple years ago, Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture and builders Höllviksnäs Förvaltnings AB won an open competition for four Passivhaus homes on a vacant lot in the city of Malmö, Sweden. The team won the competition and the low-energy houses are now finished. The project may be referred to as Salongen 35 and includes a greenhouse, green roof, gray water treatment, and solar panels.
Project Profiles
