Published by Martha Danly under Green Building, Sustainable Design

Let’s face it, I’m a little obsessed. After an only so-so experience living in a prefab house many years ago, I’m now awakening to the wonderful potential of today’s modern prefab home brought to us by such designers as Ray Kappe, Jennifer Siegel, and Charlie Lazor.

You can often find me flipping through the online portfolios of these and other prefab designers, imagining a family home in the woods of Northern Michigan or visualizing a community of musicians living and performing in a New Hampshire colony.

In one of these browsing sessions I recently came across a photo in Charlie Lazor’s FlatPak scrapbook whose caption opened up a playful metaphor:

“FlatPak’s roofs are what George Harrison was to the Beatles… understated, sometimes under-appreciated, but oh so crucial to the process.”

That got me wondering: if the roofs are the George Harrison of FlatPak, what would John, Paul, and Ringo be?

To find out, I went to the source and asked Charlie Lazor, the man behind the FlatPak system. Here’s what I learned:

• Ringo Starr was a no-brainer. “Ringo is the screws and bolts that define the shape and size of the building. He holds it all together.”
• The Paul McCartney answer came pretty quickly too. “Paul is the play of the materials. He’s the façade, the glass, the wood, the finishes. He’s what captures your eye and pleases.”
• John Lennon was a tough one. It was hard to identify a single component that conveyed the broad, deep role John played within the Beatles. But finally the metaphor emerged: “John is the interplay of clients’ vision for the house, their budget, and their tastes, design-wise. He’s the entire design system — the abstract idea behind FlatPak that allows the physical world to flourish. He’s the answer to the design problem.”

As fan of both Beatles and prefab, I thought that summed it up perfectly.

Stepping back, I asked Charlie about the main reasons most people cite when they consider building a prefab house — and how that homebuilding process differs from the one we’re more familiar with.

“Most people want a modern house,” he said. “In our culture we have no history of shopping for a house the way we do for everything else. A new house doesn’t show up in a retail window or an ad.”

Because most people want their homes custom-built, houses have always been marketed as an architectural service, not a product. That is, until prefab. The modern development of the prefab phenomenon allows us to manufacture custom buildings, while increasing quality and reducing cost, time, and waste.

Despite these clear benefits, however, the prefab market is not likely to boom overnight. Over and above our nation’s obvious current economic woes, customer acceptance of the prefab concept will take time to grow. For one thing, customers often bring preconceptions to the table, many of them incorrect in the up-to-date prefab context.

Among those who have never built a home before, perhaps the majority thinks the prefab house simply shows up at the building site and is ipso facto ready for occupancy after a few days’ assembly efforts. They’re not aware of all the work up front, including “a basket of government regulations” that must be negotiated, financing matters, design considerations, and countless other decisions. This all needs to happen before the building can be produced.

Some prefab prospects expect the process to be cheap beyond belief. Charlie hears potential customers say, “I spoke to a builder, and he said that he could build me a house for $125/sq ft.” What the buyer doesn’t appreciate (yet) is that the home he’d be getting from this builder might have vinyl siding, a small number of under-sized windows, unhealthy interior and exterior finishes, and zero distinctive design. The commodity building world has trained us (and the appraisal system) to think purely in terms of dollars per square foot, and not in the larger context — design, materials, practicality, aesthetics, sustainability — of the home we would like to inhabit.

Instead, Charlie prefers to look at prefab in the context of building a custom home, one in which the homeowner is hiring an architect and builder for a site-built house. In that light, building prefab features two major cost advantages: the FlatPak process takes only 20% of the usual design time, and the total FlatPak labor costs are less than those of the conventional route, because the FlatPak building process is predictable.

FlatPak is just about to complete the first house for which the company has full control over the manufacturing process. It is coming in at only a tiny fraction (½ of 1%) over the contract amount.

I wonder where, if at all, sustainability enters into the conventional client conversation. Based on Charlie’s observation, his clients often envision a full basket of green features that they want to achieve, while maintaining the project budget, of course. Such concerns often include things like energy-efficient appliances and boiler, cross-ventilation, nontoxic finishes, engineered wood. But conceiving and planning a house is typically a matter of general discussion, not a data-driven process. And inclusion of these desirable features does not drive the overall decision; the bottom line still runs the show.

As Charlie says, “The good thing is that it’s easy to make smart decisions, because we have a lot of choice in the marketplace. If a zero-VOC finish costs seven cents more per square foot than the old-school finish, there’s no resistance on the part of client or builder.”

Of course, if the client wants to achieve LEED Platinum certification, costs may appreciably rise. Being a purist involves a commitment to something larger, and Charlie sees the need for these people with the passion and wherewithal to be leaders. They’re paving the way and expanding the commercial market for mainstream acceptance to come.

At some point in time, proven success will dictate that these green choices will no longer be exotic ones; in fact, most likely they won’t even be choices. The future may be glimpsed in the title of the current issue of Dwell magazine:

BEYOND GREEN From Niche to Normal.