With Dwell on Design fast approaching, we’re dedicating today’s Prefab Friday to a perennial presence on the prefab scene: Michelle Kaufmann. Kaufmann’s spaces are clean, modern, breezy and daylit, and her architectural ideals fall firmly on the green side.
Best of all, Kaufmann defies our most recurring complaint about prefab, which is the ubiquity of renderings and the rarity of an actual house! She has completed many gorgeous homes and if you want one for yourself, you don’t have to wait.
Michelle Kaufmann’s homes boast a number of sustainable building features highlighted in our Green Building 101 series, including Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs), daylighting, and natural ventilation. She’s even pursuing a LEED platinum certification for her Sunset Breezehouse.
As a leader and pioneer, this prefab maven continually raises the bar for other designers in the field. She’ll be speaking at Dwell on Design alongside a stellar crew of panelists and presenters. If you can’t be there, we’ll be reporting live on all the action next weekend.
+ Michelle Kaufmann Designs
+ The Glidehouse
+ The Sunset Breezehouse
+ The Side Breezehouse
Beautiful work for prefab housing! I just returned from visiting (what used to be) Greensburg, Kansas. As you may have heard, Leonardo DiCaprio is teaming up with the Discovery Channel to chronicle the rebuilding of Greensburg as a “green” town. Greensburg was virtually wiped off the Kansas map by a massive tornado on May 4 of this year.
My challenge to ANY designer working on pre-fab design is to design an affordable, sustainable, eco-friendly home that will also stand up to the extremes of Kansas weather. Granted, nothing will stand up through an F-5 tornado, but most of the prefab housing I’ve seen here and in other publications would never make it through the blizzards of winter and the storms of summer in a typical Kansas year. The only buildings that remained standing in Greensburg were built out of brick, which isn’t exactly a prefab material.
[...] lighting, green building materials, and the same indoor/outdoor living integration featured in her Glidehouse and Sunset [...]
Michelle, great stuff, you are on the right track. How about something smaller, tiny, for us with less cash to spend. Can you mail the prefab to my homesite?
Although these homes appear beautiful in the images, the cost of the home itself paired with the site design costs realistically puts it on the more expensive end of the modern prefab options.
She has done some beautiful designs. I just wonder how expensive these homes are to errect and if they would be worth building here in South Africa.