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

Tidewater Cottage in the News

Recently, several media articles have appeared that chronicle the pre-fab tidewater cottage and our Simple Farmhouse designs. Below are links to these articles as posted on the Web, sans images:

• As McMansions Begin to Die Off, Look to the Past for Housing's Future, Washington Post, Housewatch, November 15, 2008, Katherine Salant
  
  Creating a New 'Old House' Section by Section to Feel Like Home, Rappahannock News, November 13, 2008, Laura Ruby

The original dozen designs in the Simple Farmhouse Portfolio, which you can view in detail on our firm's website, are styles that were commonly built in the Southern Piedmont region. Joining them is a new collection of Chesapeake Tidewater houses; a slightly tweaked version of the tidewater cottage is the first design in the collection. In addition to the Simple Farmhouse designs, which range from 1600-3200 sf and can be built from kits of parts or modular units, we are developing a new collection of small houses designed and engineered specifically for modular building. The new collection is called the Simple Cottage Sampler, and it will be available in 2009.The first ten cottages in the collection are inspired by the Ten Colonial Cradles of Home, which Russell wrote about in his new book, Roots of Home. The Colonial Cradles were the places in America that served as the seedbeds for our early house styles. Each of the Simple Cottages is an American classic style that emerged from a specific Colonial Cradle region.

We are hoping to build the first modular cottage on the exhibit floor at Restore Media's Traditional Building Show in Boston in mid-March. It is a real stretch to make that happen in just three months, but when the cottage design is ready, the process of modular building is very, very fast.

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.

Qroe Preservation Development

Currier prefab at Bundoran Farm/ photo by Leigh Donohue, C'ville


Currier Farmhouse front elevation

In an article from the online Charlottesville magazine C'ville, writer Will Goldsmith gives props to Qroe Farm Preservation Development, the company developing Bundoran Farm, for sticking to what they promised. The company had vowed to maintain the working farm on the property, tuck the homesites away so they are not visible from the road, and, most importantly, keep 80% of the 2,300 acres undeveloped and in conservation easements. These principles are key to a growing movement called New Ruralism that is starting to gain ground. Qroe has been involved in this type of development for more than a decade, with four preservation developments completed in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, each with more than 80% of its acreage preserved in open space. Bundoran Farm is the first outside of New England.

Qroe has a terrific vision for preserving rural land. The company is committed to bringing together three diverse groups often locked in combat -- conservationists, farmers, and homeowners -- in innovative development projects that satisfy everyone's objectives.

We live in Loudoun County, Virginia, a once-rural area that has morphed in a short decade into a poster child for development run amok. Located an hour outside of Washington, DC, Loudoun was long-renowned for pastoral beauty, historic towns, and gracious farms -- all but destroyed in the 1990s when a high-speed freeway opened to connect farm and city. Suddenly, developers were everywhere. A huge chute opened, littering subdivisions, malls, SUVs and minivans all over Loudoun, rendering it for years running the nation's fastest-growing county. Loudoun quickly transformed from rural to "exurban," a term that sounds as hideous as what it describes. Build it and build it some more, and they will come. And they did.

That is, until lately. With rising gas prices and the "economic downturn," Loudoun is no longer looking so fetching as a place to either make money or live. If a long-distance commute becomes truly unaffordable, this bedroom community is going to be a landfill for empty bedrooms.

It's too late for Loudoun County. But perhaps in our new reality-checked America, more companies will emerge with a long-term vision like Qroe Farm's -- to conserve the land and nurture an area's rural heritage rather than simply get in, get rich, and get out.

Leesburg in Loudoun County, VA / photo by Tim Dillon, USA Today

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.

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...

Wall Street Journal

Today the Wall Street Journal ran the article Selling History by the Square Foot, in which writer Christina Lewis noted a number of new communities with historic-style houses. Russell is quoted in the article, as is our friend Joe Barnes, Development Director at Bundoran Farm near Charlottesville, Virginia, where the first house will be the Currier from Russell's Simple Farmhouse Portfolio. Other communities mentioned include Brook in Waterland, a small development in New York State with 17th-century Dutch-style houses; Serenbe, a large community in Georgia with housing options ranging from loft spaces and townhomes in villages to cottages and estates edged by open space; and Phelps Settlement and Avery Lane Settlement in Connecticut, both of which feature traditional New England-style houses from Classic Colonial Homes of Deerfield, Massachusetts.