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Remo and Emi started with a feeling—calm, cozy, and simple—and went from there, outfitting the space with white limewash paint, maple plywood built-ins, and green textiles and tile.

A Murphy bed pulls out of a central, maple-clad volume that also holds a sleeping loft, a bathroom, and a kitchen designed and built by Remo. “When it’s so small, you see everything a little bit closer,” Remo says. “There was more pressure to do it right.”

Remo Kommnick and Emi Moore wanted a minimalist home that could blend with its site in rural Virginia. “We had to keep things really simple,” says architect Patrick Farley. The cabin is clad in stained western red cedar, and its form is inspired by shelters on the nearby Appalachian Trail.

Influenced by late Swedish architect Bengt Warne’s naturhus concept (in short, a house built in an agricultural greenhouse), Roja Brimalm and Johan Holmstedt worked with architect Fredrik Olson at Tailor Made Architects to design their home southwest of Stockholm.

Volumes collide to create a unique architectural form, which was constructed from pre-fabricated components in just two days.

The vertical, three-level cabin is compact in footprint, but maximizes every square foot.

Having bought and restored several quirky properties in Washington over the years, including a five-story tree house and a 100-year-old barracks, architect Jason F. McLennan and his wife, artist Tracy McLennan, bought the camp-like retreat in 2020—even though it had no power or running water at the time and is on a secluded island with no ferry service.

The pilot home on Whidbey Island demonstrates the system’s potential: a 600-square-foot interior paired with nearly equal covered outdoor space, set lightly on a pin foundation that protects tree roots and cuts carbon by 77 percent. "Puzzle Prefab can be modified according to each site,

Marie Saldivar’s experimental metal-clad dwelling is the perfect place to host family—and proof of concept for her new prefab company.

As Nicolás Tovo and Teresa Sarmiento of La Base embraced modular design as part of their architectural practice, they noticed that prospective clients were wary of prefabricated construction. So the duo teamed up with Place, an Argentine prefab builder, to make a proof of concept just outside the Patagonian resort town of Bariloche.

Inside, timber panels treated with light oil give a clean, warm, and contemporary look. “Although the unit was intended solely as my office, it is now also frequently used as a hang-out and sleepover spot for my daughter and her friends when I’m not using it,” says owner Glen Vriesema.

Candour is a prefab building system and a tool to customize building components within that system—including walls, floors, facades, and roofs—with a proprietary CAD plug-in. Users of the software can draft a design, determine if it’s feasible, and price it all in one day. Designs are built at Candour’s manufacturing facility in Sunshine, Melbourne.

“The name 'Unfinished House' refers to an aesthetic attitude…. Self-finishing materials were selected to reduce resources and reveal the building’s construction. Tile and plywood are the only added ‘finishes’; They cover areas with wiring and plumbing,” the architects tell us. “The building is an all-timber structure with cellulose and wood fiber board insulation. Many of the materials were locally-produced including the wood framing, plywood, corrugated metal, and wood cladding.”

“Unfinished House is a two bedroom, two bathroom 1,400 square foot home in Canada that is a prototype for panelized prefabricated construction with a high-performance envelope,” says Workshop Architecture. “Panelized prefab means that instead of being framed on site, the house comes flat-packed on a truck, a jigsaw puzzle of 8-to-16 foot-wide pieces that have the structure, insulation, and vapor barrier all pre-assembled.”

The interior incorporates low toxicity finishes and natural materials like timber and textural oriented strand board.

Floor Plan of Potts Residence by MiniMax