Fully furnished pre-fab homes
Oregon architecture firm, Ideabox has partnered with IKEA to launch what they say is the first line of fully furnished prefabricated houses in America, called “Aktiv” (which not surprisingly means “active” in Swedish). According to psfk.com, the designs are created with consideration to demands of residents in the area, including sustainable design features like Energy Star appliances and dual-flush toilets, while maintaining a modern look and feel that IKEA is well known for.
The interiors are furnished with a complete IKEA package including Tundra maple flooring, Pax wardrobes and Abstrakt cabinets while the exteriors are built using a combination of fiber-cement siding, corrugated metal, and a standing-seam metal roof.
According to Jim Russell, president of Ideabox, the complete home “brings all the fun and design of Ideabox houses together with all the function, design, and personality of IKEA”.
A model of the home was recently on display at the Portland Home & Garden Show and each unit is expected to be priced in the $80k range for 745 square feet of living space which of course does not include land, installation and the like.
This week, AGBeat columnist Genevieve Concannon wrote that modular/pre-fab homes are making a unique comeback in very beautiful forms, erasing the memory of double wides as the primary modular concept.
Concannon opines, “Herein lies the impending shift to modular homes: construction from stick by stick framing to construction from prefabricated panels. This doesn’t have to mean that a home is drop shipped in one piece like a 1970?s hunk of metal like the honking things that make some of us cringe and reel, but, no, modular can even be sexy.”
Photos of the new Aktiv homes:
