Video Profiles in Modern Prefab

Prefab design and building is alive and well. Despite the industry having taken it on the chin recently, with the notable business failure of modern prefab pioneer, Michelle Kaufman Designs, closing their doors, a handful of small, agile prefab building companies are finding a way to stay alive and even thrive during the credit crisis and broader recession.
 
In this first installment in our series on prefab designers and builders, we profile San Francisico-based, Modern Cabana, a small family-owned company that has practiced marketplace restraint by growing their business organically -- scaling their business through cash flow by making sales and not by taking on excessive debt loads.
 
Modern Cabana has been able to exploit the a shift in marketplace demand away from expensive, resource hogging big homes toward the idea of staying put in a smaller home and adding space within a budge and a sensitvity to sustainable building practices. It is now the height of fashion to have your Tesla Roadster parked in the garage of your low emission home  recharging from the solar array on the garage roof. One can still dream in today's market.
 
Modern Cabana fit in perfectly with this new schema -- small, sustainably built, smal footprint "accessory buildings" that can be added as subordinate building (often on the same lot) to a main house.
 
Prefab building, which promises the reduction of construction waste and damage to building sites, among other benefits, and is in a many ways synonymous with green building and sustainability appeals greatly to the green-conscious consumer. This is the true growth area of homebuilding.
 
The prefab building industry will continue to evolve and go through many more ups and downs - but in this new Darwinian marketplace -- it remains to be seen which prefab designers and builders will survive. Our bet is on companies like Modern Cabana.
 
We hope you enjoy this series as much as we enjoyed talking to the people involved in doing this work.
 
-Housing.com
 
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