Private Residence, West Dry Creek

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:15:16 -0800

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Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:35:04 -0800

Private Residence, Lower Morningside Mountain

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Private Residence, Southern Sonoma County

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Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:56:25 -0800

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gogreenre: Blu Homes’ Apple Approach to Building Green Prefab...

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 10:36:12 -0800

gogreenre:

Blu Homes’ Apple Approach to Building Green Prefab Houses

Todd Woody, Forbes Staff

In the current issue of Forbes, I write about Blu Homes, a Massachusetts startup that makes green prefab houses that fold up in the factory for shipping and are unfolded on site and bolted to a foundation in a day (see video at end of this post). The company aims to mass-produce environmentally friendly homes like Priuses, taking the cost and hassle out of custom home building.

Prefabricated or modular homes are nothing new – think doublewides. But about a decade ago they began to go upscale as architect-led firms started designing beautiful energy efficient abodes. The idea of so-called modern prefab was to shed manufactured housing’s down-market image as well as the waste and inefficiency of traditional “stick-built” homes constructed on building sites by a slew of subcontractors.

It didn’t quite work out that way. While modern prefab succeeded architecturally, it mostly failed in the factory. Firms often subcontracted manufacturing to different factories and achieved neither economies of scale nor the standardization necessary to mass-produce green homes, according to Allison Arieff, a former editor in chief of Dwell magazine and an influential figure in the modern prefab movement.

“The state of modern prefab is not good at all,” Arieff told me when I interviewed her for the magazine story on Blu. “If you figure it’s already a niche market, and it never claimed to be otherwise, you already have a small percentage of an overall housing market that is crummy.”

Blu’s founders – Bill Haney, a serial entrepreneur, environmentalist and filmmaker (The Last Mountain), and former venture capitalist Maura McCarthy – think they can succeed with an Apple approach to modern prefab: Combine drop-dead design with sophisticated software and control the entire home buying and building experience.

“We’re a technology company that builds homes,” says McCarthy, 31.

Blu has raised $25 million from angel investors like Abby Disney – Walt’s grandniece – and Haney has a 40% stake in the company. Blu used the funding to first solve a conundrum that has long bedeviled prefab firms. As Haney, 49, puts it, “The reason houses don’t get built in factories now is that to transport them they need to be narrow, but to live in them they need to be wide.”

Anything wider than 8.5 feet won’t fit on a standard tractor-trailer and thus shipping costs become exorbitant. Blu’s seven models are framed in recycled structural steel and equipped with hinges that allow a 21-foot-wide home to be folded up in a box and placed on a truck.

But it is software that makes the hardware a reality. Blu licenses an industrial-grade engineering software system called CATIA used by Boeing to design airliners, Virgin Galactic to build its suborbital space ship and automakers to create cars. When changes are made to a Blue model in CATIA, the algorithms not only make the necessary engineering adjustments but also calculate the cost and send the changes and a bill of materials to the machines and workers on the factory floor.

At Blu’s 120,000-square foot factory outside Springfield, Mass., McCarthy showed me the interface for the software that lets customers see models in 3D and choose and preview thousands of options, everything from the type of kitchen cabinets they want to the location of the kitchen.

Every item in the virtual house is a 3D replica of the actual product – down to the flanges in the Anderson windows – so that if client moves a door or chooses a more expensive appliance package, the software makes the necessary structural changes to the plans and updates the cost of the house. CATIA then tells machines on the factory floor how the steel frame should be stamped and where the holes for wiring and plumbing should be drilled.

That allows Blu to control construction costs – which have been halved over the past two years, according to Haney – while maintaining quality. For the customer, it means no endless meetings with subcontractors and visits to the construction site.

“We can give you something that is beautiful, we can give you something that’s done in a much more healthful way and it’s economic performance can be unusually good compared to a reasonable alternative,” says Haney. “We integrate design, engineering and construction and transport it to your site and put it up for you.”

Out on the factory floor, where houses are placed on giant rollers and moved from station to station, a 1,650-foot model called the Glidehouse is in the last stages of assembly, with workers installing sustainably produced wood cabinetry, low-flow toilets and other features that cut Blu homes’ energy consumption by 50%.

Later in the day, I head out to Pittsfield, Mass., in the Berkshires to take a look at an Element model that has been set up on a wooded lot for an 80-year-old customer. The light-filled 1,008-square-foot house clad in yellow siding has 13-foot ceilings and two bedrooms. The current version of the home starts at $160,000. Other Blu models are priced up to about $500,000 (land not included).

Sandra Beer, a fundraiser for a PBS station in Albany, N.Y., moved into an Element late last year with her 14-year-old daughter.

While the house offers minimal storage space, what sold her on Blu could be the company’s sweet spot: Sustainability, energy savings and minimal hassle getting a house built. “One of the things that I loved about modular is that they gave me a contract price and that is something I can control,” she says. “What I liked about Blu was that they were starting from a position of sustainability.”

But given the continuing housing meltdown, is there really a mass market for upscale mass-produced green homes beyond the coastal creative class that is Blu’s primary market?

Arieff is doubtful. “I think it’s impressive that Blu Homes has gotten the investment they have but much is stacked against them,” says Arieff, who thinks the key to creating a sustainable modern prefab industry is to focus on multi-family dwellings.

But Haney, who is set to open up a second factory north of San Francisco this year, believes there’s a cultural shift underway born of the excesses that begat the Great Recession that will spark wider demand for modern prefab.

“McMansion is now a joke and Hummer is now a punch line,” argues Haney, who invokes traditional Yankee values when discussing sustainability. “When we began this, we had this notion that the dominant ethic of American culture from 1670 to 1970 was pragmatism and self-reliance and since then we’ve become about materialism and self-indulgence.”

“The general notion that we want to be greener, we want to conserve, we want to be healthier – that’s a cultural trend that has not been thwarted by the economic downturn,” he adds.

And in a nod to more traditional architectural values, Blu’s latest model is a departure from the contemporary California esthetic of its other homes. The new model, called the Lofthouse, resembles a classic New England home, pitched roof and all.

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