Florida Virtual Houses

Prefab Homes a Hit at Dwell Design Show

June 29th, 2009

I stopped by Dwell on Design, a home design show sponsored by Dwell magazine at the Los Angeles Convention Center this weekend. This was the kind of event I expected to be really slow during the Great Recession. It cost $25 to get in and had a lot of cool, but pricey products on for sale, everything from $3,000 Ligne Roset arm chairs (and they are cool) to my bottle of Vitamin Water which cost $3.80 including tax (convention center pricing). There was actually a pretty decent-sized turnout.

The big hit seemed to the handful of prefab homes on display. Green Inc. is a Los Angeles company that makes dwellings out of converted shipping containers. That’s one of their homes above.

Modern-Shed makes the most stylish sheds you’ve ever seen. Like the Green Inc. structures, Modern-Shed’s products start at around $10,000. The company wisely positions them not as a hipper replacement for the $1,000 aluminum shed you could buy at Sears but as a low-cost addition to your home. While my wife and I liked that idea, my mother-in-law and niece didn’t seem to too keen on sleeping in the shed.

Also generating a lot of interest was a 400 square foot cottage made from reclaimed wood and other products. The cottage was very cool, kind of a cross between a shabby chic country house and the Unibomber's cabin. It’s made by an Austin company called Reclaimed Space, which auctioned off that actual home on eBay. The winning bidder paid $75,000. I remember one of the staffers in the house saying that home typically sold for $60,000, although in this case half the proceeds went to Habitat for Humanity.

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