This project’s owners, Mel Matthews and her husband, Roy, had lived on five acres of this preternaturally lovely Hampshire woodland setting for 24 years—first in a static trailer and then in an off-the-shelf mobile home—before they finally decided that they’d had enough of cold winters in their poorly insulated park home. “We looked at larger houses in the area, but we kept coming back to our beautiful site surrounded by bluebell woods and streams,” Mel says. With that in mind, the couple set out to find an architect to build a bespoke house on the site. They found their match in PAD Studio, attracted by the firm’s design approach and Passivhaus principals.

While new permanent construction is prohibited in this protected conservation area, planning permission existed for a mobile dwelling. Following extensive research into the field, PAD Studio designed Forest Lodge: a steel-frame structure featuring an open-plan layout combining living, dining, and kitchen areas, and two bedrooms, one of which doubles as an office. The house was prefabricated and fully fitted out internally—down to the ceiling fans and limestone countertops—in Yorkshire over the course of five months. It arrived on site in two parts on two flatbed trucks, and was then lifted by crane onto the existing concrete-and-limestone plinth. Photo 3 of 8 in Why 8 Architects Chose Prefab and Modular Designs by Zach Edelson

Why 8 Architects Chose Prefab and Modular Designs

3 of 8

This project’s owners, Mel Matthews and her husband, Roy, had lived on five acres of this preternaturally lovely Hampshire woodland setting for 24 years—first in a static trailer and then in an off-the-shelf mobile home—before they finally decided that they’d had enough of cold winters in their poorly insulated park home. “We looked at larger houses in the area, but we kept coming back to our beautiful site surrounded by bluebell woods and streams,” Mel says. With that in mind, the couple set out to find an architect to build a bespoke house on the site. They found their match in PAD Studio, attracted by the firm’s design approach and Passivhaus principals.

While new permanent construction is prohibited in this protected conservation area, planning permission existed for a mobile dwelling. Following extensive research into the field, PAD Studio designed Forest Lodge: a steel-frame structure featuring an open-plan layout combining living, dining, and kitchen areas, and two bedrooms, one of which doubles as an office. The house was prefabricated and fully fitted out internally—down to the ceiling fans and limestone countertops—in Yorkshire over the course of five months. It arrived on site in two parts on two flatbed trucks, and was then lifted by crane onto the existing concrete-and-limestone plinth.