Modish modular: visiting Skylab's HOMB

A cantilevered HOMB upstairs bedroom (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Over the past decade, numerous architecture firms around the country have introduced prefabricated home designs intended to streamline the high cost of building without sacrificing quality. Publications like Dwell magazine regularly tout such designs, but most of the time these projects are one-offs or only produce a handful additional constructions. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of manufactured and modular homes continue to look bland and cheap. Why isn’t there more of a happy medium?

The excellent new HOMB series by Portland firm Skylab Architecture and Seattle prefab manufacturer Method Homes (with Portland firm Rainier Pacific as one of two general contractors) might not change this dichotomy. It’s impossible to know if the first HOMB in Portland, its final construction and installation happening over the past week, will be a one-off or the beginning of an affordable new line of compelling modern prefab houses sprinkled throughout the region. But visiting the new HOMB in Northeast Portland a few days ago, I wasn’t thinking about the challenges of prefab proliferation or solving the crisis of bad designs in new single-family residential home design. I was just thinking how much I’d like to live in one of these houses.

Delivered in three pieces trucked from Seattle, the newly installed Portland HOMB is an exercise in geometry and volume. It may be prefabricated, but each HOMB can be customized. The design breaks each HOMB down to 100 square foot modules in triangular shapes that can be laid out and configured in different ways. “We’re creating a system rather than a single piece that’s designed,” Skylab’s Jeff Kovel told me in a 2010 interview, when the HOMB concept was introduced.

HOMB from its backyard (photo by Brian Libby)

The houses sell for about $160 per square foot, although of course that’s not including the cost of land. At a rough guess, that seems on the upper end of middle-class affordability. But there are cost advantages too. Construction time is greatly reduced versus traditional construction, for example, as are a host of unknowns that accompany the traditional building process.

The just completed HOMB prototype I visited in Northeast Portland was on the large size, or at least it felt that way inside. It had a four bedroom and 3.5-bathrooms, but what stood out was the double-height great room, with sunlight pouring in through floor-to-ceiling glass.

The fact that rooms are not rectangular may give some residence a challenge when it comes to how to arrange furniture. But in the great room, the problem is partially solved with a built-in modular sofa.

The winding steel staircase, painted white, was another standout. It too was trucked down from Washington as a single piece, and it felt at once cozy like a stairway on a ship yet large and transparent enough to act as a kind of sculptural element. Skylab’s design encases the steel staircase in glass, and when you’re inside it’s an almost cinematic experience going up or down, with light coming in from windows adjacent to the stairs and then bouncing off the glass enclosure.

Top: looking down the stairs, bottom: bathroom (photos by Brian Libby)

The house is also energy efficient with its heat recovery system and radiant heating, and includes alternative power by means of a rooftop solar array.

The kind of effortlessly cool, retro-futuristic style that Skylab has demonstrated in a host of interior spaces from Doug Fir restaurant and Departure Lounge here in Portland to Flavor Paper in Brooklyn comes through in the bathrooms, where tile-clad floors and walls give way to a wall of mirrors.

The triangular pieces from which the HOMB design template is comprised allow for the upper portions of the building to cantilever over the entry and back yard areas. My favorite view was in back, where one of the bedrooms extended out over the grass and decking, the latter of which is made from recycled plastic.

Speaking of materials, the exterior façade is a blackened cedar, and HOMBs are also available with the same cedar naturally stained or painted white. The use of a simple wood cladding also helps create a tie-in with the traditional single-family homes nearby.

Great room of HOMB from upstairs balcony (photo by Brian Libby)

Inside the HOMN in Northeast, the kitchen cabinets were also made from cedar (I love it when the same material is used in different applications in one project such as this), but painted white in a thin application that allowed the grains of the wood to still show through. There is also engineered bamboo flooring and black Ceasarstone quartz countertops in the kitchen.

Only time will tell what’s in store for the ongoing HOMB series collaboration between Skylab and Method, and whether the house I visited in Northeast will be one of many, one of a few, or just one. But there’s no question that modular and prefab houses are going to be a bigger part of the future of residential building, and rightfully so. Architecture is among the least efficient of endeavors. From sailing ships to microchips, we design and build everything faster and more efficiently than buildings. Modular homes have been around for many decades by now, but they’ve also long been mired in a kind of aesthetic ghetto. Projects like HOMB provide both a compelling practical argument as well as a chic vision of what prefab and modular can be.

 

Advertisement

Comments

[Lauren Jonczak]

Great post! I love the style of this house. I was looking up nationwide modular homes when I came across your post. My boyfriend and I were thinking about getting a modular home soon. I had no idea you could get one that looks like this. I guess we have more research to do. Thanks so much for sharing, this was very helpful.