Prefab homes

Manufacturers and transport experts on the journey from factory to site, and what buyers can do to make it go smoothly A modular house is built in a factory, but it still has to reach your plot, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, on public roads, in all weathers. It is one of the parts of a project buyers think about least, and one where a single bad day can cause weeks of delay. We asked...

A modular house has to work at two scales. While the completed home must accommodate the varied rhythms of daily life, each section must be designed for manufacture and transport, regardless of how many modules make up the building. In Courtyard House, designed by CHROFI for FABPREFAB, the arrangement of these components also shapes the spaces between them, giving a compact home a generous connection to...

Four prefab manufacturers on the questions buyers should ask first, and the assumptions that cost them later Two houses can look identical on paper and still be tens of thousands of euros apart, not because one manufacturer is cheaper, but because each quote quietly covers something different. A different foundation, a missing floor, a steeper plot. By the time buyers notice, they have often already...

Fifty years before modular was fashionable, Kisho Kurokawa bolted 140 fully fitted rooms to a Tokyo tower. The building is gone, but the questions it raised are the ones the prefab industry is still answering. Photograph: Tomio Ohashi Step through the door of a Nakagin capsule and you are already almost at the other end of it. The bathroom pod sits beside you. A wall of built-in equipment runs along one...

For buyers considering an off-grid prefab home, the important question is not what off-grid means, but how the different systems work together in practice. Electricity, water, wastewater, heating and cooking all need to be considered as part of one integrated design. Each system has its own cost, maintenance requirements and limitations, and choices made in one area often affect another. A heat...

Buyers spend weeks comparing floor plans. They spend days comparing finishes, cladding options, window specifications. Almost none of that time goes into a much plainer question: will this company still be standing when the house is due? It should. Construction and manufacturing are capital-intensive businesses running on thin margins, and both are unusually exposed to material shocks, supply...

Ask most people how they will pay for a house, and they picture mortgage funds being released on completion, or a bank transfer on moving day. Prefab buying rarely works that way. Because the home is manufactured before it is assembled, and because most of its value is created inside a factory rather than on your plot, payment happens in stages – tied not to calendar dates but to production milestones...

Reconstructed Country House by Veris Design Studio is a 150 m² rural retreat designed around a surviving forester’s log cabin in Belarus. Conceived for designer Veronika Bagrintseva and her family, the project preserves the existing 60 m² structure as its central living room and places new bedrooms, kitchen and service areas around it. Its defining feature is the union of two contrasting building...

NP5 has spent close to two decades bringing architecture, engineering, manufacturing and installation together under a single coordinated process. The Lithuanian company builds with precision-manufactured light-gauge steel, offers panel and modular systems side by side, and has recently installed a demonstration building in Belgium so clients can walk through the product before committing to one. We spoke...