Pretty Fabulous

Modern prefab homes are sleek, affordable and finally coming to New York City
New York is about to get a lot more fabulous. This fall, a 1,800-square-foot, two-bedroom modern prefab home will rise in The Bronx. Design experts believe it will be the first such home erected in New York City.

Short for prefabricated, prefab homes are built in factories, with the bulk of the home already completed by the time it is shipped to the site.

In the case of the home in The Bronx, the two-bedroom, two-story house will be constructed in a Scranton, Pa., factory, placed on the back of a truck, shipped to the city and hoisted onto a 25-foot-by-100-foot lot. The remaining heating and cooling components, interior bamboo floors and a deck will be added at the site.

"This is big news," says Allison Arieff, editor in chief of the design magazine Dwell and co-author of the book "Prefab." "Not only because it's a prefab, but because putting up a single-family home in a city is a big deal."

While the home is defined as a modern prefab home, a style that has gained in popularity in the United States in the last five years, prefab homes have been around for centuries.

In the early 1900s, Sears sold $650 to $2,500 homes, which could be purchased via catalogs. The home arrived in kits on trains, and with the help of friends and family, the owners usually constructed the homes themselves.

Today's contemporary prefab can mean anything from trailer homes to Cape Cods or Tudors, while giant developers like Toll Brothers often will build part of their homes in factories, Arieff says.

But while modern prefab homes have gone up in Los Angeles, putting them in a dense city like New York is more difficult, given lot sizes, height requirements and the bureaucracy involved in getting the proper building permits, Arieff says.

As a result, modern prefab companies like Resolution: 4 Architects, the Manhattan-based architecture firm designing the home in The Bronx, have largely focused on constructing modern prefab homes in rural areas. The firm, which is widely credited with aiding the modern prefab-home movement, has put up half a dozen modern prefab homes in such places as New Paltz, N.Y., Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard.

Additionally, the firm has partnered with Dwell to build a series of homes.

According to Joseph Tanney, partner at Resolution: 4 Architects, one of the biggest attractions to going prefab is that buyers can get a modern house for far less than what it would cost to build a similar home on-site.

Most prefab homes cost about $175 to $225 per square foot to build, versus the $300 to $400 a square foot it would take to build a home from the ground up.

Additionally, home buyers can shave six months or more off the construction time with prefab. Prefab homes are built in the factory in just one to two weeks, while it can take six to nine months beforehand to do the designing, engineering, and get state and local approval, according to Tanney. Add in a few months of construction at the end, and it can take a total of 12 to 18 months to get your prefab home.

For their part, the Bronx family moving into the new prefab house says that the quick construction time needed to get the house - a little over a year - was the real draw.

Resolution: 4 Architects is in the early planning stages of doing a panelized house, another style of modern prefab, for a family in Atlantic Beach, N.Y. The 3,000-square-foot, four-bedroom home will essentially arrive in panels before being assembled on-site.

But if the Resolution: 4 Architects homes have some design enthusiasts buzzing, it remains to be seen whether the city will go for the kind of mass prefab dwellings that are prevalent in Europe and Scandinavia.

In 1999, developers erected a 30-unit prefabricated apartment project in East London. With lower construction costs, rents in the building started at just $300 to $400 a month, far less than similar apartments in London, Arieff notes.

Additionally, London's First Penthouse, founded by a pair of Swedish engineers, makes prefab penthouses and lofts that can be hoisted on the tops of existing buildings, while Sweden's IKEA has a prefab apartment division, Bo Klok ("Live Smart"), that offers prefab apartments and villas all over Europe.

According to Arieff, the next logical step would be that multiple-dwelling modern prefab design comes to urban cities like New York.

"That would be my great hope," says Arieff. "That's the next place that prefab needs to go."

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