Absolutely Fabricated

Until recently, modernism has been the only architectural style to make serious inroads into prefab home manufacturing. That made sense, since boxy, minimalist houses are well-suited to the process of prefab manufacturing, whether delivered as kits of parts or modular components.

Several designers became known for their modern prefab home designs, including Michelle Kaufman for the modular Glidehouse (right, above) and Rocio Romero for the LV Series kit homes (right, below). As public awareness of prefab grew over the past five years, many other designers joined Kaufman and Romero in designing modern houses for factory fabrication.

Traditional architecture has been slower to make strides in prefab, but that's changing. The collapse of the housing industry has goosed public demand for cost-effective alternatives to custom design of traditional homes.

Russell has been promoting factory-fabricated traditional homes for years, and his Pennywise House collection includes 22 designs that can be built modularly.

Recently Dwell Magazine, the bible of modern home design, interviewed Russell for his thoughts on the future of factory-fabricated houses:

"In September 2207, we saw the beginning of the end of the old way of making houses. By 2030, we're going to see nearly all houses made to order in factories. There are fewer qualified tradesmen coming along, and young people are less interested in working in the trades. Hand-built houses are going to be far fewer, as they're going to be so expensive, available only to a few at the very highest income level. Factory manufacturing of modular houses by that time is going to be well established, and it'll become exponentially more sophisticated, more efficient, and cheaper to do it. It'll never replace the elegance of something handcrafted, but the economics are going to favor doing it this way."

We applaud the ability of Dwell magazine to stay alive in a world that's increasingly hazardous to the survival of shelter magazines (Cottage Living, Southern Living, Metropolitan Home, Country Living, House & Garden, and Domino, are no longer being published).

And of course, we were happy that Dwell chose to include Russell as a "prefab mover and shaker." A bit surprised, but happy, nonetheless.

Pennywise Prefab Houses

A year and a half ago, we were having a hard time convincing our clients of the advantages of factory fabrication. If you mentioned the word "modular," it was as if you had suggested vinyl siding; both conveyed images of what our clients didn't want in their new homes.

Builders had a different negative reaction. To many, modular was perceived as a threat to profitability, a production method that would shortcut site building and reduce their incomes.

Then the bottom fell out of the homebuilding industry, and the McMansion was declared officially dead. Prefab began to appear in the news and even had its own show at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Little by little, minds began to change.

To unemployed builders looking for new ways of working, modular started to look better and better. Homeowners began reading and hearing about factory fabrication and wondered if it might be a good option for them. Nowadays even our high-end custom clients are asking whether modular building might work for all or part of a new home.

For years Russell has been promoting factory building as a way to make new homes better, and he is very happy that the tide has turned. At Russell Versaci Architecture we have combined our Simple Farmhouse Portfolio and Simple Cottage Sampler into one Pennywise Collection, and all the designs are now available as modular houses from our partner, Haven Homes. The farmhouses range from 1600-3200 sf and the cottages from 650-800 sf. The New Homestead Almanac, a new group of designs ranging from 1000-2200 sf, is currently on the drawing board.

Above, left: The Chandler Farmhouse; below, right: The New Republic Cottage

Factory-Made, Site-Assembled

At Bundoran Farm, the Currier Farmhouse from the Simple Farmhouse Portfolio has probably shed its housewrap skin since this photo was taken a month ago and looks less like a house under siege. The cornice return, like the rest of the exterior shell, was factory-crafted in Vermont by Connor Homes and shipped to the site.

Meanwhile, here in Middleburg a stonemason has built a retaining wall in front of the tidewater cottage, now reflected against a backdrop of early autumn colors. While fall in Virginia is not an eye-popper like fall in Vermont, it's subtle and serene with distinct charm.

Certifiably Green, Part 1

This is the year for going green. In our local paper, several builders are trumpeting green building practices. It's an easy claim to make, but what does it mean?

There are two measures for determining that new buildings meet environmental targets -- Energy Star and LEED. Energy Star is a government program administered by the EPA and DOE. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is sponsored by the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council.

LEED was created in the early 90s to give quantifiable performance measures for sustainability--and also to motivate and stimulate the industry to strive to adopt best practices to earn the LEED distinction. Energy Star hails from the same time, but its focus is on energy rather than performance.

Back then, sustainability was a pretty hard sell. Long-term savings that required a higher initial cost for systems and materials were trumped by short-term cost issues. That was the case until recently, when "pain at the pump" and the shock of the monthly heating bill made it all too personal. Factor in the bad news from global environmental fronts, and sustainability suddenly becomes a major issue when planning new construction.

Today the market wants green buildings, and the industry wants to be able to market its green building creds. Hence LEED and Energy Star are much-sought distinctions these days.

As its name suggests, the Energy Star program focuses on energy, rather than performance. While the program is best known for the nifty labels on products that help consumers make buying choices, Energy Star also certifies new homes. A certified home is about 15% more energy-efficient than those built to the 2004 International Residential Code (IRC) standard, and about 25-30% more than most houses in general.

LEED rates new homes on a host of criteria, including operating costs, reduced waste, energy and water conservation, health and safety for occupants, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Certified homes qualify for tax rebates, zoning allowances, and other incentives, as well as demonstrate a commitment to environmental stewardship and social responsibility.

On the farm outside Middleburg, the geothermal heating system shown in the photos was sunk into the pond to provide energy for the prefab tidewater cottage in the background. The finished house will probably meet Energy Star requirements, and we hope it will earn LEED certification as well.

We are fortunate that the owners of the farm, our clients, are committed to the environment -- and also to traditional architecture. As designers, we are happy to be able to offer visual proof that a house built to green specifications can be beautiful and suited to its rural setting, designed in a vernacular style with appropriate detailing, built with traditional materials such as wood, stone, and brick, yet crafted using the efficiencies of factory fabrication.

Traditional Details: Wood Shingles

On the tidewater cottage, the hipped-roof dormers are topped with wood shingles that are overlapped and fantailed in a manner as old as the Virginia colony. The illustration and description below are taken from The Houses of Williamsburg: Construction and Detail (1960), an excellent reference on traditional detail used often in our practice:

"At the hips of a roof, the shingles are 'fantailed"...laid so that those on one side projected about 2 in. above and over those on the other. The choice of which side of the ridge to carry up in this manner was not settled by chance or whim, but with a sound regard for orientation: it had to be the side that received the most prolonged rain. In Virginia, where it was common knowledge that the northeasterly storms were the ones to be feared, the 18th-century builder chose the north or east."

On our 21st-century tidewater cottage, the shingles crest to the east, since the heaviest rain hits the farm from the west.

A Prefab Currier at Bundoran Farm

The Daily Progress/Andrew Shurtleff

A prefab Currier, which is a design from the Simple Farmhouse Portfolio, is the first house to be built at the Bundoran Farm preservation development near Charlottesville. In this article from the Daily Progress, Brian McNeill writes about the Bundoran project, the Currier design, the prefab process, the builder group, the development company, and much more. The Currier is the design that has become Russell's iconic house. It is based on a custom home built in Waterford, Virginia, that Russell designed in the mid-1990s. We continue to hear from people who saw the house in a magazine a decade ago and have never forgotten it.

The custom home in Waterford on which the Currier is based

We have added a new blog feature: a list of links to recent online articles that are piquing our interest. We scan online media regularly to monitor trends in the housing industry and ensure that we are taking the practice in the right direction for changing times.

Beautiful Brick

Here is the brick to be used for the foundation and chimney of the tidewater cottage. It's a Cushwa handmade brick called Old Savannah. With lovely variation in texture, contour, and color, the bricks look as if they were salvaged from an old building.

Cushwa is the artisan line from Redland Brick, a company that also makes machine-moulded bricks and brick pavers at their other plants. Since 1872 the Cushwa plant has been handmaking bricks the same way: by pressing clay into sand-coated wooden moulds, then removing the bricks to be fired in a kiln. The colors of the finished bricks range from orange to black, depending on how close they are placed to the fire in the kiln.

Handmade new brick is a great choice for a new old house, but, like salvaged brick, it's an expensive one. Fortunately, there are brick products at all different levels of cost and quality for giving a house an authentically old look. Russell has spec'd Boral Thin Brick , a 3/4" thick brick facing made of concrete, in several Simple Farmhouse Portfolio designs.

The Chandler Farmhouse

At the Homestead Preserve in Warm Springs, Virginia, the Chandler is being built on a site with a drop-dead gorgeous view of the Blue Ridge mountains.

The side and back of the Chandler at the Homestead Preserve

Wouldn't this be a great spot to sit and watch the hawks ride the air currents as they fly south?

Reconfigured for the hillside setting, the Chandler now has a walk-out basement


Chandler front elevation as originally designed for flat land

The Homestead Preserve is a conservation development in a tiny hamlet close to the Homestead Resort in White Sulphur Springs, Virginia. The developers, Celebration Associates, acquired a tract of 11,500 acres of pristine land. Their first act was to transfer 9,250 of them to the Nature Conservancy for protection in perpetuity, and later, to donate conservation easements for an additional 935 acres to the Virginia Outdoors Foundation.

Homes are being built on just 325 acres of the Homestead Preserve. Residents enjoy privileges at the 200-year-old Homestead Resort, including golf, tennis, cultural and social events, and spas such as the Jefferson Pools in Warm Springs -- where a certain weary ex-President traveled in 1818 to take the waters in the Gentleman's Spa.

Like the tidewater cottage in Halfway, the new house at the Homestead Preserve was built from a factory-fabricated kit of parts crafted in Vermont by Connor Homes and delivered by truck to Warm Springs for assembly by a crew from Ilex Construction.

HABS and Historic Precedents

Russell's new book is titled Roots of Home, which is how he refers to the particular mix of culture and customs that shaped an area's classic home styles. The first settlers in a region took building traditions they knew from where they came from and adapted them to the climate, resources, and landscape in the new place. Through the years the styles of the houses evolved with new migrations and cultural influences, and they are still changing today as they're modified to fit how we live in the 21st century.

To plan a new old house, we begin by researching the native-grown homestyles of the place in which the house will be built. In our office at Russell Versaci Architecture we have an extensive architectural library with more than 1000 volumes; many are antiquarian and most are out of print. On the shelves are hundreds of books with old drawings and photographs of houses that serve as a great resource for researching vernacular traditions.

Although we feel fortunate to have this extensive architectural library on site, we also rely on another resource -- one that's available to anyone with a computer. The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) is a huge electronic archive of drawings and photographs of early American architecture that is free and easy to search on the Library of Congress website. (For the story of HABS, read Russell's column titled Picturing Home, which appeared in the summer issue of New Old House magazine.)

All this information serves to introduce the drawing at the top of the post. It is a HABS drawing of a house that served as a historic precedent and design inspiration for the prefab tidewater cottage. The house was called Maidstone, and its record states that it was located in the vicinity of Owings in Calvert County, Maryland. Beyond that little bit of information, we don't know anything else about the house, like whether or not it still exists. Many of the houses in HABS are no longer standing. The project was begun during the WPA years to document in photographs and measured drawings the early architecture of our country before it fell to ruins or was bulldozed to make way for the march of progress.

A Prefab House Takes Shape

Outside Middleburg, the factory-fabricated cottage is looking very much like its rendering. On the second floor, the dormers now have their windows, and the roof has been covered with asphalt felt paper.

Clapboard siding and trim moulding are being applied, and the house is partially covered in GreenGuard Housewrap. The Marvin windows are double-hung with simulated true-divided light. The hipped style of the dormer was common in early Virginia and can be seen on houses in colonial Williamsburg.

Renewable Energy from the Pond

Geothermal energy from the pond
will be used to heat and cool the house

Aided by a week of near-perfect weather, the prefab Tidewater Cottage is quickly taking shape. As you can see from the photo, it's becoming easy to imagine the finished house nestled among the trees above the pond.

Although the pondside location is idyllic indeed, the decision to site the house there was more than just an aesthetic one. The pond will be used for a geothermal heating and cooling system that will save on energy costs and reduce pollution compared to a traditional HVAC system.

Eight feet below the surface of the pond the temperature remains a steady 55 degrees year round. The geothermal system will pump water through a system of looped coils on the pond bottom to extract heat energy to be sent to the house to provide heating in winter and cooling in summer. The system is being supplied by Mark Campbell of Renewable Energy Solutions in Rixeyville, Virginia.

Of course, it's still a lovely place to put the house.

Halfway in Halfway

Floor deck with waterproofing on foundation

Insulated precast concrete foundation panels and floor joists

1st-floor wall panels and 2nd-floor gable ends

Here are progress photos of the factory-fabricated Tidewater Cottage being built on a farm in Halfway, Virginia, named such because it is situated halfway between Middleburg and The Plains. The construction crew from University Homes was impeded by several days of rain and record-breaking heat and humidity, but the weather has stabilized now, and things are going quickly.

It's the first time this crew has built a prefab house. The four framers are experienced, and, while the process isn't difficult for them, it does require a shift in mindset. Working with factory-fabricated parts means assembling from instructions rather than cutting the parts themselves.

The folks in the factory at Connor Homes have marked the house parts clearly, bundled them sequentially, and provided clear instructions. Once the crew finds the needed parts, assembly is quick and easy.

A Precast Foundation

The precast concrete foundation for the Tidewater Cottage arrived and was installed in just three hours. The first photo shows the assembled foundation, which was manufactured by Superior Walls. You can see the chimney, basement window, and just about make out the ledges and ties that will help support the handmade brick veneer.

The second photo shows the crushed-stone bed awaiting the foundation. The manufacturer uses crushed stone for the footing rather than poured concrete because it's faster and easier to install and more flexible. We will be adding a liquid applied asphalt membrane to waterproof the foundation.

Tidewater Cottage

This drawing shows the side elevation of the English tidewater vernacular-style cottage to be built near Middleburg. The front elevation is shown in the previous post. The house, which will be a caretakers' cottage, is to be built from a knocked-down kit of parts.

The sloping roof on the front and back of the main section of the house is called a catslide, and it was a signature feature of the Chesapeake Bay English tidewater cottage style.

The earliest versions of these cottages were one room deep, with steep roofs and gable ends. By extending the overhang of the roof in the rear, the cottage could be enlarged with additional bedrooms; the ensuing variation was called a catside. Later, the roof in the front was extended in the same way to shelter an outdoor living space called a porch. By the 18th century, homes all over the South had begun to sprout porches, galeries, verandas, and piazzas to help people cope with the sultry southern summers.

Home Delivery

In the past year we have begun working with Connor Homes in Middlebury, Vermont, to have houses fabricated and delivered flat by truck to the client's home site. Russell sees great potential in prefab and modular technologies to make good traditional design more affordable. He has written about the topic in two Architect's Principles columns in New Old House magazine, House in a Box in the Winter 2007 issue and Pennywise in Winter 2008.

We have two fabricated houses being built in Virginia at present, one at the Homestead Preserve in Warm Springs and one at Bundoran Farm near Charlottesville; both are designs from Russell's Simple Farmhouse Portfolio. A third is a custom design for a client that we expect to be delivered this week. We are especially excited about this one, since we'll be able to see the process at every stage from delivery to finished home.

The design is for a caretaker's cottage to be built on a Middleburg horse farm, and it's styled after the English tidewater cottages of colonial Maryland and Virginia. Tidewater cottages were timberframed and weatherboarded, with low brick foundations, double chimneys, and front porches. The front porch was new to the English colonies in the mid-18th-century, and it expanded the living area and served a social function as a place to chat with passers-by and greet visitors.

The design for the house in Middleburg is an amalgam of Russell's design and designs done by Rob Hale for the Simple Farmhouse Portfolio Tidewater Collection. Rob is the project architect on this house.

We'll photograph the house in its various stages and post photos here. Watch this space...