Prefabs Across California

Passionate cooks, the Burtons installed a Mugnaini wood-fired oven in their kitchen and had a custom Grillery fireplace-barbecue built into the concrete block wall on their deck. Beneath the grill they store oak firewood collected from their property.

The living space and bedrooms are separated by two small courtyards. Linda Taalman reclines in a small, inflatable wading pool in the home's "firecourt," facing south toward the desert.

The Blue Sky prototype home tiptoes gracefully across the desert landscape just north of Joshua Tree National Park. Nestled amid piñon and juniper trees and outcroppings of boulders, the house’s six steel columns permit a seasonal stream to run underneath it. The clever steel frame allows the house to float above the wilderness—a concession to the lightness on the land that its owner, architects, and engineers so clearly wanted.

Nearby, a concrete island contains various appliances. With the extra surface area, there’s plenty of room to roll out dough, and a wide berth for Ian’s power chair.

Impressed by the Rudolf M. Schindler house in West Hollywood and Craig Ellwood’s Case Study house, water feature choreographer and technology developer Scott Palamar wanted to build a minimalist prototype of his own. And despite his lack of architectural training, he jumped at the opportunity to experiment with a modular structure when he purchased a $5,000 parcel of land in the Eastern Sierra in 2004.

A prefab in-law unit in Sonoma, California, enabled a daughter to move her mother nearby, without taking away her freedom.