Fine Living: Prefab cabanas catch on as affordable extra room

Prefab Cabanas home picture

Nate Cohen wanted to add on a guest bedroom to his home in Larkspur; instead he added a guest house complete with a kitchenette and full bath in his front garden, and was ready to welcome out-of-town visitors in just a few months.

"Everybody who sees it, wants to come and stay in it," he says of his compact 12-by-25 prefabricated building with knotty cedar siding and a 50-year steel roof.

And why not? There's a shower/tub combo and a tile floor from Tile Stone in San Rafael in the bathroom; a cooktop, maple cabinetry and granite countertops in the kitchen; and floor-to-ceiling windows and engineered walnut flooring in the open living space.

His studio by Modern Cabana, the latest model to roll off the San Francisco company's assembly line, is highly customized, but all models are "green" with recycled denim insulation, dual-pane or low-E coating windows, no or low VOC finishes and FSC-certified wood down to the studs. Because it uses off-the-shelf materials, "we have just a tiny pile of waste - only 5 percent waste compared to usual 30 percent of a site-built project, owner and architect Casper Mork-Ulnes says.

Green Design: SG Blocks Shipping Container Homes

Green Design Prefab Home Picture

SG Blocks Shipping Container Homes – Though ugly on the docks, shipping containers can be turned into something beautiful. The SG Blocks Harbinger Prefab is constructed of five containers. That means the steel frame can withstand hurricanes and earthquakes. Its also eco-friendly with FSC-certified woods, solar panels, rainwater recycling and a resource monitoring system from Agilewaves. Best of all, this funky home took under five hours to assemble after a month of fabrication, and it doesn’t look too much like the raw materials. To call one of these your home, it would take a day and a crane to install up to 12 containers, and the Lawrence Group, who designed the SG Blocks home, says it costs 15 percent less than a typical home constructed of wood. Time to get stacking.

Dwell retools on prefab with Marmol Radziner, Turkel Design

Turkel Design on Prefab

Put this one in the category of Interesting Timing. Just as other modern prefab companies are scaling back or calling it quits -- and as real-estate developers and architecture firms of all sizes continue to struggle -- Dwell magazine is launching a new iteration of its prefab construction arm.

At its Dwell on Design conference this weekend in Los Angeles, the company will unveil a new collaboration, under its Dwell Homes Collection label, with architecture firms Marmol Radziner and Turkel Design.

Turkel -- run by Joel Turkel, an architect and a veteran of Empyrean, the company that developed Dwell's prefab line before abruptly closing last year -- will design three prefab houses for Dwell Homes. L.A.'s Marmol Radziner, which recently shuttered its own prefab factory in Vernon, will offer six. The houses will be built by Lindal Cedar Homes, an established manufactured-home company based in Seattle.

My guess is this is more about the appearance of momentum for Dwell's prefab efforts than actual momentum.

Prefab: Blue Sky Homes prototype in Yucca Valley

Blue Sky Prefab Home Picture

The pitch on this prefab prototype in the desert actually came from AEP Span, the company that manufactured the roof. The design is a prototype from Blue Sky Homes, which touts the light-gauge galvanized steel frame as a less costly alternative to some of the custom structural steel modular designs winning magazine spreads. The design, by Palm Springs-based o2 Architecture, is a kit of parts assembled on site and meant to be both site-specific and flexible enough to work in other settings. For more details on the cost and construction time -- and for more photos -- click to the Read More.