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A corner townhouse that borders the Warren Place Mews in Brooklyn was occupied by the same family for generations. Architect Nate McBride, who reworked the interior for the new owner points out that the window heights get dramatically smaller the higher up you go.

In a small community with a common garden, FabCab built this prefab home incorporates high-quality materials like Douglas fir to keep the home from feeling clinical, despite its construction in a factory. The architects incorporated universal design features like flooring that wheelchairs can roll over easily and grab bars, making the homes appropriate for aging clients.

Established in 1989, Structural Modulars Inc. is a modular construction company that both designs their own range of modular homes and also pairs with outside designers and architects to build unique, modular home across the United States. Their state-of-the-art facility is located in Strattanville, PA, with easy and direct access to a number of highways for ease of transportation.

"Radical sustainability

Acclaimed for being sustainable, affordable, and adorable, tiny homes are also superb teachers when it comes to organization and design.

Affordable, adorable, and in many cases, transportable, these tiny homes made a big impact on our readers this year.

Nestled in the hills of the Smoky Mountains and oriented to prioritize views of the Appalachian Trail, this prefab cabin is constructed out of three shipping containers topped with a generous, double-sided overhang that creates two porches. The upper-level shipping container is available for vacation rentals on Airbnb.

Headquartered in Walpole, Unity Homes seeks to make high-performance, low-energy homes widely available and more affordable. Throughout the years, the team has streamlined the production process of their prefab customized homes, depending on client needs. They create detailed three-dimensional computer models, which turn into the digital plans for large parts of the dwellings. The plans are then followed closely as the home's components are produced off-site, which reduces as much construction waste as possible.

The Outward Bound cabins, designed by the University of Colorado Denver's design-build program, have steel frames that lift the structures above a three-foot snowpack while supporting corrugated-steel "snow roofs."