Small Fabulous

Dwell’s first issue devoted to prefab (“Prefab is Pretty Fabulous!” January 2001) featured this black-and-white home by Anderson Anderson Architects.

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

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.”

Floor plan for Refugio Bariloche by Nicolás Tovo and Teresa Sarmiento

A wood-burning stove heats the 840-square-foot home during winter months.

Go Home by Go Logic is a design/build firm that designs and constructs modular homes that stand out in the crowd: they're both modern and contemporary, but still harken back to the traditional architecture of farms and barns in New England.

Founded in 2001, Showcase Homes has built more than 1,000 homes and frequently designs custom modular homes for their clients. They offer turnkey services, where they design new home layouts, have prints drawn by the engineers at their manufacturing partners, assist with and provide all the necessary ground work needed to prepare a site for a new home, install the heating and plumbing systems, install the electrical system, and assist with the financing for your new home.

Maine Modular & Manufactured Homes build a broad range of homes, from more traditional chalets and capes to more updated, modern takes on the traditional New England farm. Their construction systems are designed so that once final finish selections are complete, it will only take only two or three weeks until you can move into your new home. Heating, plumbing, and electrical systems are tested in the factory, resulting in a home that's 90-percent complete upon delivery.

Patnaik took inspiration from Eileen Grey’s villa and Le Corbusier's cabana for her little holiday home.

The weeHouse exteriors are clad in corrugated Cor-Ten, but with a custom pattern of folds to create an organic randomness. The foundations were designed with a shallow recess around the top to make the modules look like they’re hovering. After they bought the property in early 2014, the Siegels camped there for two summers while they saved up money and planned a permanent structure. In his research, BJ came across this design, a customizable prefab house by Alchemy Architects. "Of all the things that I found, I was drawn to that one because it was absolutely the simplest and cleanest," he says.

This house has an exterior of black panels and clear-grain cedar tongue-and-groove siding, and a rooftop deck that lets its owners enjoy the outdoors.

Keep founders Austin and Kotono Watanabe revived a compact home in Minneapolis with a dazzling kitchen, an all-electric upgrade, and a clerestory “scoop.”