Your House as Furniture

Last week, the IKEA BoKlok pre-fab, flatpack house hit my radar. As Jen and I are looking at another major renovation, the pre-fab route is pretty attractive.

Skimming Treehugger.com’s Prefab category, I found their article on the Flatpak House, from local architect and designer Charlie Lazor. Just in time to add his talk at the U to the calendar.

My notes from his talk follow:

He started by reviewing the home furnishing work he did at Blu Dot. While sharing the story of designing a bookshelf, he offered this poignant observation how far paper and pencil will take you:

“We spent so much time arguing whether or not it would work, and when we prototyped it, it worked remarkably well. We could have saved so much time, if we had just build it sooner.”

His goal with Flat Pak is to build an open system in architecture akin to other open systems, like Linux. He explains:

“Rather than the governing body determing what you do, this [Flat Pak House] perhaps like Linux, provides the user a point of entry into the system to manipulate it.”

He compared existing manufactured homes to cars:

“The view from the windshield only changes as you move the car.”

Flat Pak, he sees as an open, active system, something like Garanimals where:

“Even if you let people run it, not trained as architects, you can’t mess up too bad.”

The goal is to create building blocks of houses, a set of things that go together in a logical way and are:

  • intuitively understood
  • flexible, “with the final form depending on when you want to let things rest.”
  • easy to ship
  • fulfills needs + desires. With no more than you need and no less than you need

When talking about working with clients, he stated, “We can’t start with a blank sheet of paper, we have to get to a solution quickly.” To do so, he created a set of stickers, of Flat Pak’s basic exterior forms. (this is how Jen and I determined our dining room set wouldn’t fit in our new dining room. )

All the walls, including the foundation, have a very high tolerance - within 1/16″. Putting up a Flat Pak house is “closer to assembling a piece of furniture than construction.”

Everything is considered furniture - the house, the kitchen, the shower pans. All in 8 ft. sections.

Bringing us inside the Flat Pak house.

“The inside space is an open space, it does not have interior walls or structural elements.”

For example, if you don’t like where the kitchen is, there’s little preventing you from moving it to a better location - the plumbing and wiring are included in the wall sections.

In the bathroom, the vanity’s wall section has all the holes pre-cut: sink, electrical, and towel rack. All out of MDF, sent to the finisher, delivered in stacks, and ready for installation.

“Do as little as possible to get the most out of it”

He wraps up with this:

“The true test, really, is the years after inhabitation…”

He’s hoping to hear that Flat Pak houses continue to server their residents. Rather than:

“We disassembled it and sold the house on eBay.

Though, he continues,

“It’s structured in such a way, you could sell part of the house on eBay.”

    For your future reference, he offers these cost/sq. foot estimates on new construction

  • traditional custom architecture: $200-$250
  • Flat Pak: $130-$150