The first Glidehouse "The first Glidehouse™ ever built is actually Michelle and her husband's own residence"

Glidehouse™ by Michelle Kaufmann Designs, Inc.® / Photo courtesy of John Swain

House Proud

High design in a factory-made home? Michelle Kaufmann believes she holds the key

  • By William Booth
  • Smithsonian magazine, January 2007

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    Michelle in designing the home was making it feel big even though the square footage was modest

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    Like the robot maid and the flying car, the perfect prefab house seems like one of those futuristic promises that never quite come true. You know the house: a light and airy, clean and green 3 BR, 2 BA constructed of renewable, energy-efficient materials—delivered to your doorstep. A modern house you can buy the way you buy almost everything else, with a click of the mouse. A modular house that can be assembled in an afternoon and comes complete, right down to the towel racks in the bathroom. Just plug in the utilities.

    This is the house that Michelle Kaufmann believes she has designed—a young architect's answer to the challenge of bringing good design to the masses. "We want to create sustainable homes, of high quality, for a reasonable price, for the middle classes," says Kaufmann, 38. And to do that, she says, "you need an assembly line."

    Not too long ago, Kaufmann bumped into her old boss, architect and design maestro Frank O. Gehry. "You know," he said, "some pretty smart people have tried this and failed." Indeed, several masters of 20th-century architecture saw the promise of prefab—giants such as Walter Gropius, Charles and Ray Eames and Joseph Eichler—but they could not redeem it.

    But where others have failed, Kaufmann sees a way. Gropius or the Eameses could have built the factories to make their prefabricated homes, she says, but they lacked a crucial piece of technology. "The Internet is the key," she says. "A house is not a toothbrush," meaning a one-size-fits-all, perishable good. "You need and want to interface with the customer," to get a sense of how your building might be tailored to individual needs.

    But instead of taking a dozen meetings with an architect, pinning down a hundred details, a Kaufmann prefab buyer meets with her once and then communicates with her through a Web site and by e-mail, selecting from a limited menu of options. "If you had to take meetings, you could never have mass production," says Kaufmann, who grew up in Iowa and holds degrees in architecture from Iowa State and Princeton universities. "But with e-mail, we can make the changes, we can tweak in an instant. You can keep the process moving forward."

    The prefab house is hot again, at least in the pages of shelter magazines, and Kaufmann's designs are some of the smartest around; she has "definitively answered the question, ‘Why prefab?'" wrote Allison Arieff when she was editor of dwell magazine. One of them is on view through June 3 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., in an exhibit titled "The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture and Design." Another one, a demonstration project Kaufmann did with Sunset magazine in 2004, went up in a parking lot in Menlo Park, California, and was visited by some 25,000 people over two days. On her own she has designed a third, called mkSolaire, tailored more for urban than suburban lots. Kaufmann's firm's Web site (mkd-arc.com) has received some 15,000 inquiries for information on her modular homes.

    How many prefabs has Kaufmann built? A dozen. Which hardly constitutes a revolution—high design, tailored prefab still remains more of an idea than a product line, but Kaufmann vows to change that.

    She came to her "eureka" moment through personal experience. In 2002, she and her then-new husband, Kevin Cullen, a carpenter and contractor, began to look for a place to live in the San Francisco Bay Area; they quickly confronted the brutal realities of a real estate market gone bananas. Their choices were as frustrating as they are familiar: pay a gazillion dollars for a tear-down in close-in Oakland (and end up with no money to rebuild) or move to the far reaches of former farmland for a long commute from a soul-sucking tract of mini-mansions.

    They looked for six months. "It was really depressing," Kaufmann recalls. "I seriously thought about what kinds of bad decisions had I made in my life to end up in a place where we could not afford a home. We actually went into therapy."

    So they decided to build a house themselves. They found a narrow lot in suburban Marin County, and Cullen went to work on a Kaufmann design with a simple but beguiling floor plan of connected rectangles, just 1,560 square feet, with an easy flow from space to space—a curtain of glass doors under a shed roof covered with solar panels. They called it the Glidehouse. Friends took a look at the plans and said: Make us one too. "This is the thing," Kaufmann says. "They didn't want me to design them another house. They wanted our house, the exact same house. And that's when I thought, hmm, could we make this in mass production?"

    Like the robot maid and the flying car, the perfect prefab house seems like one of those futuristic promises that never quite come true. You know the house: a light and airy, clean and green 3 BR, 2 BA constructed of renewable, energy-efficient materials—delivered to your doorstep. A modern house you can buy the way you buy almost everything else, with a click of the mouse. A modular house that can be assembled in an afternoon and comes complete, right down to the towel racks in the bathroom. Just plug in the utilities.

    This is the house that Michelle Kaufmann believes she has designed—a young architect's answer to the challenge of bringing good design to the masses. "We want to create sustainable homes, of high quality, for a reasonable price, for the middle classes," says Kaufmann, 38. And to do that, she says, "you need an assembly line."

    Not too long ago, Kaufmann bumped into her old boss, architect and design maestro Frank O. Gehry. "You know," he said, "some pretty smart people have tried this and failed." Indeed, several masters of 20th-century architecture saw the promise of prefab—giants such as Walter Gropius, Charles and Ray Eames and Joseph Eichler—but they could not redeem it.

    But where others have failed, Kaufmann sees a way. Gropius or the Eameses could have built the factories to make their prefabricated homes, she says, but they lacked a crucial piece of technology. "The Internet is the key," she says. "A house is not a toothbrush," meaning a one-size-fits-all, perishable good. "You need and want to interface with the customer," to get a sense of how your building might be tailored to individual needs.

    But instead of taking a dozen meetings with an architect, pinning down a hundred details, a Kaufmann prefab buyer meets with her once and then communicates with her through a Web site and by e-mail, selecting from a limited menu of options. "If you had to take meetings, you could never have mass production," says Kaufmann, who grew up in Iowa and holds degrees in architecture from Iowa State and Princeton universities. "But with e-mail, we can make the changes, we can tweak in an instant. You can keep the process moving forward."

    The prefab house is hot again, at least in the pages of shelter magazines, and Kaufmann's designs are some of the smartest around; she has "definitively answered the question, ‘Why prefab?'" wrote Allison Arieff when she was editor of dwell magazine. One of them is on view through June 3 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., in an exhibit titled "The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture and Design." Another one, a demonstration project Kaufmann did with Sunset magazine in 2004, went up in a parking lot in Menlo Park, California, and was visited by some 25,000 people over two days. On her own she has designed a third, called mkSolaire, tailored more for urban than suburban lots. Kaufmann's firm's Web site (mkd-arc.com) has received some 15,000 inquiries for information on her modular homes.

    How many prefabs has Kaufmann built? A dozen. Which hardly constitutes a revolution—high design, tailored prefab still remains more of an idea than a product line, but Kaufmann vows to change that.

    She came to her "eureka" moment through personal experience. In 2002, she and her then-new husband, Kevin Cullen, a carpenter and contractor, began to look for a place to live in the San Francisco Bay Area; they quickly confronted the brutal realities of a real estate market gone bananas. Their choices were as frustrating as they are familiar: pay a gazillion dollars for a tear-down in close-in Oakland (and end up with no money to rebuild) or move to the far reaches of former farmland for a long commute from a soul-sucking tract of mini-mansions.

    They looked for six months. "It was really depressing," Kaufmann recalls. "I seriously thought about what kinds of bad decisions had I made in my life to end up in a place where we could not afford a home. We actually went into therapy."

    So they decided to build a house themselves. They found a narrow lot in suburban Marin County, and Cullen went to work on a Kaufmann design with a simple but beguiling floor plan of connected rectangles, just 1,560 square feet, with an easy flow from space to space—a curtain of glass doors under a shed roof covered with solar panels. They called it the Glidehouse. Friends took a look at the plans and said: Make us one too. "This is the thing," Kaufmann says. "They didn't want me to design them another house. They wanted our house, the exact same house. And that's when I thought, hmm, could we make this in mass production?"

    To hear her preach the prefab gospel, building a home from scratch, on-site—with what she calls "sticks"—makes little sense, while a factory committed to punching out Glidehouses provides nothing but advantages. There is quality control and little waste. Because the house moves down an assembly line, shuttled from station to station with overhead cranes and constructed on a grid with precision cuts, the joinery is plumb, the angles true.

    "The factory reuses; the stick builder throws trash in the dumpster. With prefab, you build only what is needed," says Kaufmann. "The wood and other materials are not exposed to rain and the elements. There is also the human element: you know people are going to show up for work. There's no waiting for the subcontractor."

    To prove the idea's benefits, Kaufmann performed an experiment in 2003 and 2004. While Cullen built the Glidehouse prototype from scratch on their Marin County lot, she worked with a manufacturer to complete an identical Glidehouse in a factory. The results: the site-built Glidehouse took 21 months to design, engineer and permit, and 14 months to build. The modular version was built in four months. (Kaufmann thinks she can shave this down to six weeks or less.) The site-built home cost $363,950 to build, or $233 per square foot, while the modular house cost $290,500, or $182 per square foot, including shipping. Both required additional spending for lots, foundations, landscaping, driveways, decks and garages.

    After the experiment, Kaufmann dedicated her firm exclusively to prefab construction. "I was just young and naive enough not to know how hard this would be," she says.

    Kaufmann soon learned that there were established companies already manufacturing modular structures for oil-field workers or temporary classrooms—decent boxes for temporary shelter, though hardly Glidehouses, with their lightweight paperstone kitchen countertops made of recycled paper, their roofs ready for clip-on solar panels and their clerestory windows. But her efforts to reach them were unavailing—she would discover that they wouldn't even call her back because they considered architects too difficult, and too time-consuming, to work with.

    Undeterred, she says, "I basically became a stalker" and got through to a few manufacturers, enough to persuade them that "the future can be much more than what they had been doing." She contracted with them to make 11 Glidehouses and one Breezehouse, but she was still frustrated by the length of time the revolution was taking. So in 2006, she took the plunge and bought her own factory, 25,000 square feet east of Seattle, from a retiring modular house builder. She moved in this past October, with a goal of producing 10,000 prefabs over the next ten years. That's close to the number of post-and-beam houses—still considered jewels of mid-century modernism—that Joseph Eichler built in California between 1949 and 1974.

    For Kaufmann, prefab offers something else worth celebrating: a truly green building. "We've already done all the homework to find the most sustainable materials," she says. A client may like a bathroom to be blue or green, but either way it will be lined with recycled glass tiles, finished with nontoxic paint, lit by energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs and equipped with low-flow faucets and a tankless water heater.

    "I think about the house like I think about a hybrid car," says Kaufmann, who drives a Toyota Prius. "You can be more efficient, but you don't have to change your life. With the hybrid, you still go to the gas station and fill it up. With the prefab houses, you make it easier to go green."

    Her most cherished insight? "You have to stop thinking like an architect and start thinking like a manufacturer," Kaufmann says. "When I started on this, I didn't realize that the way to do it was to do it all."

    William Booth is a Los Angeles-based staff writer for the Washington Post who covers culture and the arts.


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    Comments

    Good article but why no E-Mail or way to contact Michelle Kaufmann ? She is the one who is trying to get this thing off of the ground, chy not give her a plug to get people to her ? I know that I would like to get in touch with her. Maby you could send me her E-Mail. Thanks Michael Runyan

    Posted by MICHAEL RUNYAN on August 15,2008 | 01:24PM

    I read this article with great interest-I'll e-mail it to my niece who is going for a Masters in architecture. Also, my husband John was extremely interested in pre-fab houses. We never got around to doing it. He died in August of 2006 with a terminal lung disease. In his honor, if I thought of buying a house now (at 73 years old), I'd go in your direction. Of course, if I found a piece of ground at a reasonable price on Long Island, I'd contact you! Keep up the good work. Much luck, Mrs. Anne Bailey

    Posted by Anne Bailey on August 15,2008 | 06:27PM

    From a designer/builder/remodeler's point of view I think your idea is great. I've found through experience that stick building is very wasteful no matter how hard I've tried to build conservatively. Labor, as you mention, is another great hurdle to be leaped. With your product labor resides in minimum status, and for a handy creative person becomes relegated to a bottom rung. I wish we had known about your product when we were in design mode. Our contractor could not be pinned down to a price and we thusly abandoned the project opting instead for purchasing a home already built. If we ever build again we will definitely be in touch. By the way, when we were in design mode we did consider other pre-fab products all of which were extremely uninteresting.

    Posted by John on August 17,2008 | 11:20AM

    I enjoyed reading this article and was thrilled with the concept. I feel that the prefab home will become even more popular as the younger citizens decide to build. I find it hard to enjoy seeing a "MacMansion" being built, because too often lovely trees and shrubs are sacrificed so the house goes from lot line to lot line or as close as possible. I would have enjoyed seeing pictures of the house designs. That is the only negative comment I have for this article.

    Posted by Patbooks on August 18,2008 | 07:43AM

    In your construgtion of homes do you use any pressure treated lumber as we live in a high Termite area. Do you do any thing special for areas where high winds and tropical storms come arround yearly. Are nails or screws used in your design. Thank you Si

    Posted by Si Lambert on August 19,2008 | 05:29PM

    In the past manufactured homes, i.e. mobile homes, have been treated as second class solutions by the banks and local government zoning laws. Is this concept of green pre-fab housing going to be received differently by the financial institutions and local government zoning personnel? Gary Celustka Oregon

    Posted by Gary Celustka on August 19,2008 | 05:57PM

    I would also like to see some floor plans or at least a snapshot of one or more of your prefabs. We are trying to encourage a brother(brother-in-law) to go with a prefab on his lot. What is the best way to introduce him to you for the purpose of luring him into a serious consideration of your concept? Keep up this great endever!

    Posted by Geoff Phillips on August 21,2008 | 10:56AM

    The answer to a prayer! I am about to clear out a 1910 house to simplify my life, and I have specific needs caused by a disability that prevents my working full time. The "greenness" and the economic considerations are worth pursuing. I genuinely hope I will be able to contact you soon--before I land in the "too much stuff" and "like GOOD architecture (product of Cornell U.)" looney bin! What a great answer!

    Posted by Hamilton Media on August 21,2008 | 02:08PM

    I lived in a pre-fab house in 1952 in Fairless Hills PA. It worked very well. There was not much choice of materials, but it was interesting how each resident made changes to make theri own. I think this is a very sensible way to go. I never though about it before, but now in retirement I am living in a mobile home that is not mobile. Pre-fabs have been around for a long time. Go Green!

    Posted by Joyce Wilder-Jones on August 21,2008 | 03:45PM

    The heart of the article is in the following quote: "The site-built home cost $363,950 to build, or $233 per square foot, while the modular house cost $290,500, or $182 per square foot, including shipping. Both required additional spending for lots, foundations, landscaping, driveways, decks and garages." What planet is she on and what planet are her buyers from? In my neighborhood, at those prices one could build a virtual Taj Mahal from "sticks" and have money left over for ice cream and cake! Sorry, nice idea but it won't sell in my neighborhood. Maybe that's why smarter and more experienced architects couldn't make it work.

    Posted by Andy Kenagy on August 21,2008 | 05:17PM

    My late husband and I have wondered for years why in the world we are still stuck in the "stick-built-house" mode. It has to be the most costly, not to mention frustrating, way to aquire a home. We were told years ago that in Japan there are factory built modular units available, whose parts could be "mixed and matched", but we never followed up on it.(That was in the dark ages before the Internet). Good Luck getting this idea finally off the drawing board. On our island TRULY affordable QUALITY housing is badly needed.

    Posted by Irmgard Conley on August 21,2008 | 08:07PM

    I like this idea coming back, and I hope it really takes hold. My question is: What makes this different than the prefab Sears houses of many years ago, and also the 'build in one day' homes from the '50s & early '60s. I remember a long time ago now watching a actual house go up in one day. I too would like to see some floor plans, even though the price quoted in the article is still not in my price range.

    Posted by Susan Adix on August 22,2008 | 06:29AM

    I just read the article in the Web-magazine of the Smithonian magazine. This woould solve a lot of problems in ND state for those who can not find apartments or houses to rent or buy. We are in the midst of an oil boom. Housing is limited. I could see this type of home being used in WA state where we winter & our kids live. It sounds like it would be a pleasant starter home for young people newly married & starting a new family. I am interested in this.

    Posted by CarolAnn Sanderson on August 22,2008 | 08:59PM

    I agree with an earlier comment that $182 per square foot might seem a bargain in the Bay Area, but is just very unrealistic in the vast majority of areas of the U.S. Perhaps with "quantity", though, the price could be driven down. Also: would like to see the concept utilized on some more traditional style homes rather than modern-type "glidehouse" which would not be a style I would choose. An Arts and Crafts look would be most welcomed!

    Posted by Suzanne on August 25,2008 | 07:09AM

    this reminds me of the "icharus project" on the georgia tech campus. a fully "green house" that i think was modular. great idea! i hope it takes off

    Posted by frank blackston on August 25,2008 | 09:23PM

    Why are these houses always shown out in a rural setting, with trees and wide views? Isn't it a bit like ads that show the car zooming down a pretty mountain road all alone? Houses are built on city lots, and cars sit in traffic. Escapism doesn't help us to progress.

    Posted by Mike O'Brien on August 26,2008 | 08:26PM

    Re-emergence or make-over of a good idea. Perhaps, she should consider opening a facility in the Southeast where the price of production should be lower and acceptance of prefab housing is high. (The number of mobile homes and double-wides; ie. prefab housing is evident throughout the area.) That means that the competition is high and her prices must be competitive or her concept something that appeals to a different group of people. If her houses have wide appeal she could ship them to other areas and still be competitive. Where she is positioned it looks like she may attract a market from the West Coast and perhaps a few major cities. To me, more important than building green is that people build so that they conserve energy and get energy from a green source. An aside: hybrid cars, at present, are just a rip-of from car companies (maybe in the future they will prove to be of value but I suspect that they are sapping energy and resources from developing realistic all-electric cars and transportation). I had a 1994 Ford Escord deisel when I lived in England and it had comparable fuel consumption. There are many, clean-air, deisel cars in Europe now that have comparable fuel consomption.

    Posted by James Senn on March 9,2009 | 06:02AM

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