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I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. All that pouring and sawing and drilling and slathering of raw materials to do one-off designs f

by Joeri 8y ago

I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. All that pouring and sawing and drilling and slathering of raw materials to do one-off designs for houses that are then filled with standardized ikea furniture which fits the custom room shape poorly. Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach. Either we make carpenter and bricklayer robots to do the bespoke work cheaply, or we build homes from standardized parts.

jgibson 8y ago
I'm not so sure. Whats the average lifespan of a house? 50-80 years? To me it makes sense to invest the time to optimize design to make best use of the land area. I guess you could still use somewhat standarized parts though, spend more effort in the design phase.
- kazen44 8y ago
  > I'm not so sure. Whats the average lifespan of a house? 50-80 years? make that a 100 years easily. (atleast in my country). Heck, some houses don't even have architectural drawings because of their age.
  - Jarb 8y ago
    My architecture wife said houses today are designed (in the US) to last at least 50 years. However I seriously have my doubts that a house could make it that long without some major renovations/overhauls along the way, given that they're essentially built as plywood sheets, stapled to wood planks, protected by plastic siding, and covered with a tar sheet roof down here where I live. I wish the developers invested more into the longevity of a house instead of pinching every penny they can.
    - lallysingh 8y ago
      My house is 65 years old, built like this. The wood's kept dry, and the rest of the house is just gypsum, wire, and pipe. As long as the roof and exterior walls hold up, there's not much to it. And the roof you change every dozen years or so.
    - zip1234 8y ago
      As long as you keep the innards dry it could last hundreds of years.
    - adventured 8y ago
      US houses can easily last 100+ years. Once they're enclosed, basic maintenance and rare exterior repair/replace gets you a century, unless a natural disaster hits or a freak accident (major fire). With metal roofing becoming common, that removes having to replace the roof except every ~40 years. You can find plenty of poorly constructed 100+ year old homes in the US, with original innards put together every which way in a shoddy fashion before there were building codes and standardization of construction. And yet there they are, still going with basic maintenance.
      - Jarb 8y ago
        Nice, did not know all that. TIL ^^
    - planteen 8y ago
      What city do you live in? I live in Denver. Houses last way longer than 50 years here. Old houses here are quite desirable due to many of these neighborhoods proximity to downtown. The last two houses I rented were from the 1929 and 1943. They were in great shape. They were not the "old house" on the block either, both neighborhoods dated to that era. Of course they have had several roofs in that time, but roofs don't last much longer than 15-20 years here due to hail. Siding has a limited life, but Hardie Plank which most new builds I see around here has a very long life. Brick will last basically forever along with plaster walls and hard wood floors. The foundation, framing, and plywood basically last forever if you keep it dry.
      - astura 8y ago
        Even the highest quality roof only lasts ~30 years at the most. I have asphalt roll roofing which is cheap but needs to be replaced every 5-8 years.
        andrewksu 8y ago
        Metal goes 100+ yrs. Doing the same thing (asphalt) and expecting different results = insanity.
- rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
  Here in Ithaca, NY, many of the houses standing today were built before Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn. Ironically, they’re among the best housing stock, because unlike many mid-20th century constructions, the older houses are free of asbestos and lead paint.
  - cbr 8y ago
    Huh? People used lead paint widely, and many 100+ year old houses were painted with it.
  - aorloff 8y ago
    More likely the quality of wood and carpentry is higher. You can't buy wood these days, certainly not economically, that compares with what was standard 100+ years ago.
    - greedo 8y ago
      Yup. Most studs and beams were made of far better would than the short growth wood we have now. Heck, there are firms that specialize in recovering old wood from barns and factories since the wood is so much denser, and the size is simply unavailable elsewhere.
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    Survivorship bias: you don't see the shoddy homes from that time period because they didn't make it.
- astura 8y ago
  The majority of the houses in my neighborhood are older than 50-80 years. Mine is close to 80 and doing just fine. A house should last 150 years at least, provided it's maintained.
- gnopgnip 8y ago
  The lifespan of a house is a ship of theseus type question. The wiring in the walls, plumbing, foundation and frame could last 50+ years if everything else was done right, and there is no water going where it is not supposed to. Modern roofs, windows, air conditioner and heater last 25-30 years. A water heater is going to last about 15 years. Exterior paint, interior paint, carpet, all last about 10 years. After 50 years you will have replaced a substantial portion of the value of a house even if it looks more or less the same. Even if the home is habitable there are other reasons they are removed. After a certain point it makes more sense financially to tear a home down and rebuild than to continue to renovate it. Also markets change over time, and homes are not always built in a way that maximizes the use of the land. An area that was mostly bungalows and ranches can have homes replaced with larger homes or multifamily buildings.
megaman22 8y ago
It's not super expensive or time-consuming to throw up a standard, American stick-built house. Once you have a foundation poured, you can do all the framing, sheathe it, roof it, and have it ready for finish work in a week with a handful of people. What takes forever and a day is the signoffs, and waiting for all the deliveries and third-parties to show up and do their piece. And then all the fiddly stuff inside...
- vvanders 8y ago
  Having just gone through this process can confirm. You also have different states/counties having different zoning requirements for stuff like wind/snow load, etc. If you're building from materials it's much easier to go from 2x4 -> 2x6 and stronger trusses/foundation than re-engineer a whole modular structure.
- derefr 8y ago
  Sure, that's sensible; a house is at this point almost an artisanal good, like a wicker chair. Something people buy to go against the grain of standardization and conformity. But isn't it weird that there aren't more copy-and-paste condo buildings? Maybe not even in the same city—you don't want a Brasilia[1]. But, once you've gotten an architect to design a large building, why not get N times the materials, and then build the same building in as many cities as are compatible with the building codes it was designed under? [1] http://thomaslockehobbs.com/brasilia/index.html http://thomaslockehobbs.com/brasilia/index.html
  - osdiab 8y ago
    China, HK, Singapore have a lot of copy paste buildings lined up next to each other, which I find pretty odd to look at and dehumanizing/alienating to be surrounded by (though probably very efficient to build, and it seems like Chinese people don't mind too much). You'd see them as soon as you left the airport if you visit there sometime. I found many cities in China in particular look very similar to one another in a not great way because of similar architectural choices including copy paste buildings, which apparently the government has noticed—I can't find the article about it but the central government is making moves to get Chinese cities to stop being built in exactly the same way/destroy and replace too much of their historic buildings with culturally diverse architecture. Not to say we shouldn't do what you're saying, but if we do it we should probably do it in a way that doesn't make all our cities too generic.
mikestew 8y ago
I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. Anything else falls into the dreaded "modular home" category. You know, just one step above a single-wide trailer, at least in the minds of some. Never mind the fact that the only thing separating my ungodly expensive house in Redmond, which sits on a slab, from a modular home is that it was built onsite. "Bespoke"? phhhffft, I can find you a dozen houses within the radius of our daily dog walk that are exactly the same. Personally, I think the status quo is equivalent to Ford dropping a box of parts at your local dealership, and you have to wait for the mechanic to assemble it. Why aren't robots framing my house in a factory somewhere?
- vvanders 8y ago
  FWIW that's how all the trusses on your house were probably done. I think it's mostly a cost/benefit tradeoff. My hunch is that the overhead of building on-site isn't that great when you have to figure in the overhead of shipping/designing something in a modular way. Pretty much everything is 8ft long in terms of building materials which makes it much easier to transport.
- TylerE 8y ago
  Because cars fit on all of our common transportation devices. Houses, or even rooms, don't.
- rtkwe 8y ago
  There are places that do factory assembly of things like framing then ship it out to the job site, google or search youtube for preframed wall factory. It's becoming more popular precisely because labor and time are in short supply.
- Blackthorn 8y ago
  Modular construction is pretty big here in upstate NY. I've never seen a stigma against it vs stick built, and it does not appear to be a differentiator in home pricing here.
- andrewksu 8y ago
  Most modular just does it wrong. Doing fixed design is a great opportunity for better, deeper design. Think Apple or Tesla type design and engineering. Not many complaints around cookie cutter Audi RS7's or even Hyundais The status quo is a home depot and it all gets figured out on the fly. We would be in a much better place with engineered kit as you describe Ford doing.
rtkwe 8y ago
There are some places doing things similar to the Factory OS but for home. 100% prefab homes have a certain stigma in the US due to quality issues. Also many people want an at least somewhat customized home so there's limits to what can be pre-assembled. There are some parts that are being pre-assembled offsite and trucked to the home like the Factory OS in the article. It's just mainly the framing etc that is predone then the customized elements like flooring and fixtures are added on site. One big factor preventing us from doing the same thing as the article for homes is the need to support customization. With a large apartment complex there's enough of the exact same sets of rooms being created that building them all out then shipping out makes sense, trying the same thing for homes (without a change to people accepting much more identical housing) would require stocking and setting up a lot of different tile and hardwood and loosing scale efficiencies.
patja 8y ago
Well you used to be able to buy a nice craftsman home from the Sears catalog, and many of them are still in use today.
the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
> I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. I know very little about building construction but we just bought a new-built in Vienna and very little of that seems bespoke. The entire construction is largely made from standardized prefab elements (I think there are around 130 units in here).
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  Yeah, even the high-end new developments around here seem to be made up of a repeating set of 4-6 different standardized designs to pick from.
danschumann 8y ago
If there is one thing technology has been doing, it has been taking things that were once only possible with a large organization, once only possible with lots of knowledge, once only possible with lots of money; and making those things do-able by one person. Building houses fits a few of those. So it's foreseeable that eventually someone will be able to build a house with an app, for fairly low money, fairly quickly, fairly automated, but it might be many years until it's really that cheap/easy. A potential stop gap would be like an app that told you every single step how-to build your house: buying, delivering, cutting, etc etc etc, for the millions of edge cases of construction.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  Huf Haus has been around a while. I first saw them on Grand Designs where they put up a beautiful house in 7 days. (only thing that had to be done on site was groundworks, the house turned up on a couple of lorries and efficient germans (tautology possibly) put it together, cleaned up and left. Expensive though.
adrianmonk 8y ago
With some exceptions, every site is different. The lot may be shaped one way or another. Maybe it's long and thin or maybe it's roughly square. There might be a tree that you want to save. Maybe the area is hilly and the lot slopes downward from back to front, so you want to build on the flatter front portion because it's easier, and there's adequate drainage so that's OK. Or maybe there isn't adequate drainage so you'd be better off putting the house on the higher part of the lot. Maybe there's a two-story house next door and if you put windows in the wrong places, they can look right down into your bedroom. Or maybe there isn't and you need all the windows you can get on that side of the house because that's south-facing so it's the best place to have them from an energy efficiency point of view. If there's an alley behind the house, you probably want the garage to back up to that. If there isn't, you'll have to put the driveway on the front. Unless it's a corner lot, in which case you might want it on the side if the street on the front has heavier traffic or bad visibility. Maybe there's a view so you want the living room on the back of the house so everyone can enjoy that view. Or maybe the view is to the side so you want the living room there. You get the idea. The best house you can build on a piece of land depends on a lot of factors specific to that piece of land. So customized designs help you achieve that.
- vvanders 8y ago
  Yup, to expand on that you don't even need to make it bespoke. Just having the option to mirror a floor plan makes a huge difference in how well you can use a plan. We did that with our new house, flipped where the kitchen/livingroom would be so the good view out of the back of the house is much more usable. Super easy to do with a stick-built house, probably a fair bit harder with modular.
- andrewksu 8y ago
  The vast majority of lots can be addressed with a handful of designs. No need to solve for all outliers. Complete bespoke design can be wonderful, but comes with high cost and time. Fixed designs can also be wonderful, and much more accessible. Check out https://www.acre.co https://www.acre.co as an example. Disclaimer - I'm a founder.
Someone 8y ago
Or you 3D print them: https://www.3dprintedhouse.nl/en/ https://www.3dprintedhouse.nl/en/
njoro 8y ago
> All that pouring and sawing and drilling and slathering of raw materials to do one-off designs for houses that are then filled with standardized ikea furniture which fits the custom room shape poorly. Well, IKEA does have a joint venture with a construction company to make prefab apartments. https://www.boklok.com/about-the-BoKlok-concept/ https://www.boklok.com/about-the-BoKlok-concept/ https://medium.com/@bartholomewhearn/the-flat-pack-taken-to-the-next-level-the-boklok-concept-26078e433b3f https://medium.com/@bartholomewhearn/the-flat-pack-taken-to-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwvvcgoHC9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwvvcgoHC9w > Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach. Not in the US were there are always people willing to swing a nail gun to feed thier family.
- andrewksu 8y ago
  Recent CA costs for a framer range $65-125/hr. That adds up fast.
Johnny555 8y ago
In developments where they build many identical houses, there is some re-use - the concrete forms used to build one slab are hauled down the block for the next one. Also, preformed wall framing is sometimes trucked in, as are roof trusses and other pieces. So there's still a lot of pre-built components that are used when building multiple houses.
johan_larson 8y ago
Factory-made homes do exist, but they acquired a bad reputation somewhere along the line, and tend to get used only in limited applications, such as summer cottages. What is gaining ground, apparently, is prefabricating components of houses, which are then assembled on site rather than doing everything on site from plain lumber. Stairs, for example, are often made from kits.
- devonkim 8y ago
  A house I owned was built in two halves, transported, and joined together down the middle (a “marriage wall” results). The primary issues I hit weren’t the house - it was insuring the thing and properly classifying it. Some insurance companies called it manufactured and raised the rates significantly outright refused to insure, others call it stick built because of the set of standards were sufficient to note that this is not a mobile home. The other issues were around the fireplace being classified as an insert (non-masonry) which evidently also makes the house uninsurable to some companies in North Carolina. Basically on paper, a lot of these off-site manufactured and local assembled homes sound like double wides and lower income housing options and the gains get erased in insurance premiums because you get lumped in with high risk owners despite buying a $500k+ custom home basically.
ryandrake 8y ago
A huge amount of American suburbia is soulless copy/pasted McMansions and copy/pasted townhouses. Lucky for us, my father was a building contractor so he designed and custom built the home I grew up in, but AFAIK that is super rare nowadays, and is limited to rich people who can afford something custom. Everyone else in suburbia gets cut/pasted houses with the same faux brick facades, tacky arches, and cheap plastic siding on the walls that don’t face front.
castratikron 8y ago
Bricklaying robots have been a thing for a few years now. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-times-as-many-bricks-as-construction-workers/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-t...
- DrScump 8y ago
  Unreinforced masonry won't cut it in earthquake country.
awalton 8y ago
Houses aren't even that "bespoke" - most homes come from a stock set of designs that builders bought 20-30 years ago and have simply been churning out the same house... There are so many places in America that claim to have different house designs and yet they're identical or mirror images of one another. Maybe one's got a different trim package or a different set of cabinets or countertops... but otherwise indistinguishable from one another. Stick-and-frame is still the most prevalent way to build homes for numerous other reasons though, like ease of available materials, roads being non-ideal for transporting large, heavy edifices, and the general perception of prefabricated homes being... not so great... due to seeing prefabbed mobile homes and the lack of quality that's incredibly common in that industry, amongst numerous other reasons. What has seemed to really change things recently are "SIPs" - Structural Insulated Panels - essentially prefabbed wall segments that you can then jinga together to make a home. They've become wildly popular in some parts of the country as they are easy to transport on the back of an 18-wheeler, easy to install with or without a construction crane, and take care of multiple construction steps at once, greatly reducing build times. They can often be more energy efficient too, as they have fewer seams and the insulation is applied more evenly (often an expanding foam is used instead of fiberglass, which also boosts the R value by quite a bit).

by Joeri 8y ago

jgibson 8y ago

I'm not so sure. Whats the average lifespan of a house? 50-80 years? To me it makes sense to invest the time to optimize design to make best use of the land area. I guess you could still use somewhat standarized parts though, spend more effort in the design phase.

kazen44 8y ago
> I'm not so sure. Whats the average lifespan of a house? 50-80 years? make that a 100 years easily. (atleast in my country). Heck, some houses don't even have architectural drawings because of their age.
- Jarb 8y ago
  My architecture wife said houses today are designed (in the US) to last at least 50 years. However I seriously have my doubts that a house could make it that long without some major renovations/overhauls along the way, given that they're essentially built as plywood sheets, stapled to wood planks, protected by plastic siding, and covered with a tar sheet roof down here where I live. I wish the developers invested more into the longevity of a house instead of pinching every penny they can.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    My house is 65 years old, built like this. The wood's kept dry, and the rest of the house is just gypsum, wire, and pipe. As long as the roof and exterior walls hold up, there's not much to it. And the roof you change every dozen years or so.
  - zip1234 8y ago
    As long as you keep the innards dry it could last hundreds of years.
  - adventured 8y ago
    US houses can easily last 100+ years. Once they're enclosed, basic maintenance and rare exterior repair/replace gets you a century, unless a natural disaster hits or a freak accident (major fire). With metal roofing becoming common, that removes having to replace the roof except every ~40 years. You can find plenty of poorly constructed 100+ year old homes in the US, with original innards put together every which way in a shoddy fashion before there were building codes and standardization of construction. And yet there they are, still going with basic maintenance.
    - Jarb 8y ago
      Nice, did not know all that. TIL ^^
  - planteen 8y ago
    What city do you live in? I live in Denver. Houses last way longer than 50 years here. Old houses here are quite desirable due to many of these neighborhoods proximity to downtown. The last two houses I rented were from the 1929 and 1943. They were in great shape. They were not the "old house" on the block either, both neighborhoods dated to that era. Of course they have had several roofs in that time, but roofs don't last much longer than 15-20 years here due to hail. Siding has a limited life, but Hardie Plank which most new builds I see around here has a very long life. Brick will last basically forever along with plaster walls and hard wood floors. The foundation, framing, and plywood basically last forever if you keep it dry.
    - astura 8y ago
      Even the highest quality roof only lasts ~30 years at the most. I have asphalt roll roofing which is cheap but needs to be replaced every 5-8 years.
      - andrewksu 8y ago
        Metal goes 100+ yrs. Doing the same thing (asphalt) and expecting different results = insanity.
rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
Here in Ithaca, NY, many of the houses standing today were built before Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn. Ironically, they’re among the best housing stock, because unlike many mid-20th century constructions, the older houses are free of asbestos and lead paint.
- cbr 8y ago
  Huh? People used lead paint widely, and many 100+ year old houses were painted with it.
- aorloff 8y ago
  More likely the quality of wood and carpentry is higher. You can't buy wood these days, certainly not economically, that compares with what was standard 100+ years ago.
  - greedo 8y ago
    Yup. Most studs and beams were made of far better would than the short growth wood we have now. Heck, there are firms that specialize in recovering old wood from barns and factories since the wood is so much denser, and the size is simply unavailable elsewhere.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  Survivorship bias: you don't see the shoddy homes from that time period because they didn't make it.
astura 8y ago
The majority of the houses in my neighborhood are older than 50-80 years. Mine is close to 80 and doing just fine. A house should last 150 years at least, provided it's maintained.
gnopgnip 8y ago
The lifespan of a house is a ship of theseus type question. The wiring in the walls, plumbing, foundation and frame could last 50+ years if everything else was done right, and there is no water going where it is not supposed to. Modern roofs, windows, air conditioner and heater last 25-30 years. A water heater is going to last about 15 years. Exterior paint, interior paint, carpet, all last about 10 years. After 50 years you will have replaced a substantial portion of the value of a house even if it looks more or less the same. Even if the home is habitable there are other reasons they are removed. After a certain point it makes more sense financially to tear a home down and rebuild than to continue to renovate it. Also markets change over time, and homes are not always built in a way that maximizes the use of the land. An area that was mostly bungalows and ranches can have homes replaced with larger homes or multifamily buildings.

megaman22 8y ago

It's not super expensive or time-consuming to throw up a standard, American stick-built house. Once you have a foundation poured, you can do all the framing, sheathe it, roof it, and have it ready for finish work in a week with a handful of people. What takes forever and a day is the signoffs, and waiting for all the deliveries and third-parties to show up and do their piece. And then all the fiddly stuff inside...

vvanders 8y ago
Having just gone through this process can confirm. You also have different states/counties having different zoning requirements for stuff like wind/snow load, etc. If you're building from materials it's much easier to go from 2x4 -> 2x6 and stronger trusses/foundation than re-engineer a whole modular structure.
derefr 8y ago
Sure, that's sensible; a house is at this point almost an artisanal good, like a wicker chair. Something people buy to go against the grain of standardization and conformity. But isn't it weird that there aren't more copy-and-paste condo buildings? Maybe not even in the same city—you don't want a Brasilia[1]. But, once you've gotten an architect to design a large building, why not get N times the materials, and then build the same building in as many cities as are compatible with the building codes it was designed under? [1] http://thomaslockehobbs.com/brasilia/index.html http://thomaslockehobbs.com/brasilia/index.html
- osdiab 8y ago
  China, HK, Singapore have a lot of copy paste buildings lined up next to each other, which I find pretty odd to look at and dehumanizing/alienating to be surrounded by (though probably very efficient to build, and it seems like Chinese people don't mind too much). You'd see them as soon as you left the airport if you visit there sometime. I found many cities in China in particular look very similar to one another in a not great way because of similar architectural choices including copy paste buildings, which apparently the government has noticed—I can't find the article about it but the central government is making moves to get Chinese cities to stop being built in exactly the same way/destroy and replace too much of their historic buildings with culturally diverse architecture. Not to say we shouldn't do what you're saying, but if we do it we should probably do it in a way that doesn't make all our cities too generic.

mikestew 8y ago

I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. Anything else falls into the dreaded "modular home" category. You know, just one step above a single-wide trailer, at least in the minds of some. Never mind the fact that the only thing separating my ungodly expensive house in Redmond, which sits on a slab, from a modular home is that it was built onsite. "Bespoke"? phhhffft, I can find you a dozen houses within the radius of our daily dog walk that are exactly the same. Personally, I think the status quo is equivalent to Ford dropping a box of parts at your local dealership, and you have to wait for the mechanic to assemble it. Why aren't robots framing my house in a factory somewhere?

vvanders 8y ago
FWIW that's how all the trusses on your house were probably done. I think it's mostly a cost/benefit tradeoff. My hunch is that the overhead of building on-site isn't that great when you have to figure in the overhead of shipping/designing something in a modular way. Pretty much everything is 8ft long in terms of building materials which makes it much easier to transport.
TylerE 8y ago
Because cars fit on all of our common transportation devices. Houses, or even rooms, don't.
rtkwe 8y ago
There are places that do factory assembly of things like framing then ship it out to the job site, google or search youtube for preframed wall factory. It's becoming more popular precisely because labor and time are in short supply.
Blackthorn 8y ago
Modular construction is pretty big here in upstate NY. I've never seen a stigma against it vs stick built, and it does not appear to be a differentiator in home pricing here.
andrewksu 8y ago
Most modular just does it wrong. Doing fixed design is a great opportunity for better, deeper design. Think Apple or Tesla type design and engineering. Not many complaints around cookie cutter Audi RS7's or even Hyundais The status quo is a home depot and it all gets figured out on the fly. We would be in a much better place with engineered kit as you describe Ford doing.

rtkwe 8y ago

There are some places doing things similar to the Factory OS but for home. 100% prefab homes have a certain stigma in the US due to quality issues. Also many people want an at least somewhat customized home so there's limits to what can be pre-assembled. There are some parts that are being pre-assembled offsite and trucked to the home like the Factory OS in the article. It's just mainly the framing etc that is predone then the customized elements like flooring and fixtures are added on site. One big factor preventing us from doing the same thing as the article for homes is the need to support customization. With a large apartment complex there's enough of the exact same sets of rooms being created that building them all out then shipping out makes sense, trying the same thing for homes (without a change to people accepting much more identical housing) would require stocking and setting up a lot of different tile and hardwood and loosing scale efficiencies.

patja 8y ago

Well you used to be able to buy a nice craftsman home from the Sears catalog, and many of them are still in use today.

the_mitsuhiko 8y ago

> I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. I know very little about building construction but we just bought a new-built in Vienna and very little of that seems bespoke. The entire construction is largely made from standardized prefab elements (I think there are around 130 units in here).

ceejayoz 8y ago
Yeah, even the high-end new developments around here seem to be made up of a repeating set of 4-6 different standardized designs to pick from.

danschumann 8y ago

If there is one thing technology has been doing, it has been taking things that were once only possible with a large organization, once only possible with lots of knowledge, once only possible with lots of money; and making those things do-able by one person. Building houses fits a few of those. So it's foreseeable that eventually someone will be able to build a house with an app, for fairly low money, fairly quickly, fairly automated, but it might be many years until it's really that cheap/easy. A potential stop gap would be like an app that told you every single step how-to build your house: buying, delivering, cutting, etc etc etc, for the millions of edge cases of construction.

noir_lord 8y ago
Huf Haus has been around a while. I first saw them on Grand Designs where they put up a beautiful house in 7 days. (only thing that had to be done on site was groundworks, the house turned up on a couple of lorries and efficient germans (tautology possibly) put it together, cleaned up and left. Expensive though.

adrianmonk 8y ago

With some exceptions, every site is different. The lot may be shaped one way or another. Maybe it's long and thin or maybe it's roughly square. There might be a tree that you want to save. Maybe the area is hilly and the lot slopes downward from back to front, so you want to build on the flatter front portion because it's easier, and there's adequate drainage so that's OK. Or maybe there isn't adequate drainage so you'd be better off putting the house on the higher part of the lot. Maybe there's a two-story house next door and if you put windows in the wrong places, they can look right down into your bedroom. Or maybe there isn't and you need all the windows you can get on that side of the house because that's south-facing so it's the best place to have them from an energy efficiency point of view. If there's an alley behind the house, you probably want the garage to back up to that. If there isn't, you'll have to put the driveway on the front. Unless it's a corner lot, in which case you might want it on the side if the street on the front has heavier traffic or bad visibility. Maybe there's a view so you want the living room on the back of the house so everyone can enjoy that view. Or maybe the view is to the side so you want the living room there. You get the idea. The best house you can build on a piece of land depends on a lot of factors specific to that piece of land. So customized designs help you achieve that.

vvanders 8y ago
Yup, to expand on that you don't even need to make it bespoke. Just having the option to mirror a floor plan makes a huge difference in how well you can use a plan. We did that with our new house, flipped where the kitchen/livingroom would be so the good view out of the back of the house is much more usable. Super easy to do with a stick-built house, probably a fair bit harder with modular.
andrewksu 8y ago
The vast majority of lots can be addressed with a handful of designs. No need to solve for all outliers. Complete bespoke design can be wonderful, but comes with high cost and time. Fixed designs can also be wonderful, and much more accessible. Check out https://www.acre.co https://www.acre.co as an example. Disclaimer - I'm a founder.

Someone 8y ago

Or you 3D print them: https://www.3dprintedhouse.nl/en/ https://www.3dprintedhouse.nl/en/

njoro 8y ago

> All that pouring and sawing and drilling and slathering of raw materials to do one-off designs for houses that are then filled with standardized ikea furniture which fits the custom room shape poorly. Well, IKEA does have a joint venture with a construction company to make prefab apartments. https://www.boklok.com/about-the-BoKlok-concept/ https://www.boklok.com/about-the-BoKlok-concept/ https://medium.com/@bartholomewhearn/the-flat-pack-taken-to-the-next-level-the-boklok-concept-26078e433b3f https://medium.com/@bartholomewhearn/the-flat-pack-taken-to-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwvvcgoHC9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwvvcgoHC9w > Manual labor is too costly for such a bespoke approach. Not in the US were there are always people willing to swing a nail gun to feed thier family.

andrewksu 8y ago
Recent CA costs for a framer range $65-125/hr. That adds up fast.

Johnny555 8y ago

In developments where they build many identical houses, there is some re-use - the concrete forms used to build one slab are hauled down the block for the next one. Also, preformed wall framing is sometimes trucked in, as are roof trusses and other pieces. So there's still a lot of pre-built components that are used when building multiple houses.

johan_larson 8y ago

Factory-made homes do exist, but they acquired a bad reputation somewhere along the line, and tend to get used only in limited applications, such as summer cottages. What is gaining ground, apparently, is prefabricating components of houses, which are then assembled on site rather than doing everything on site from plain lumber. Stairs, for example, are often made from kits.

devonkim 8y ago
A house I owned was built in two halves, transported, and joined together down the middle (a “marriage wall” results). The primary issues I hit weren’t the house - it was insuring the thing and properly classifying it. Some insurance companies called it manufactured and raised the rates significantly outright refused to insure, others call it stick built because of the set of standards were sufficient to note that this is not a mobile home. The other issues were around the fireplace being classified as an insert (non-masonry) which evidently also makes the house uninsurable to some companies in North Carolina. Basically on paper, a lot of these off-site manufactured and local assembled homes sound like double wides and lower income housing options and the gains get erased in insurance premiums because you get lumped in with high risk owners despite buying a $500k+ custom home basically.

ryandrake 8y ago

A huge amount of American suburbia is soulless copy/pasted McMansions and copy/pasted townhouses. Lucky for us, my father was a building contractor so he designed and custom built the home I grew up in, but AFAIK that is super rare nowadays, and is limited to rich people who can afford something custom. Everyone else in suburbia gets cut/pasted houses with the same faux brick facades, tacky arches, and cheap plastic siding on the walls that don’t face front.

castratikron 8y ago

Bricklaying robots have been a thing for a few years now. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-times-as-many-bricks-as-construction-workers/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-t...

DrScump 8y ago
Unreinforced masonry won't cut it in earthquake country.

awalton 8y ago

Houses aren't even that "bespoke" - most homes come from a stock set of designs that builders bought 20-30 years ago and have simply been churning out the same house... There are so many places in America that claim to have different house designs and yet they're identical or mirror images of one another. Maybe one's got a different trim package or a different set of cabinets or countertops... but otherwise indistinguishable from one another. Stick-and-frame is still the most prevalent way to build homes for numerous other reasons though, like ease of available materials, roads being non-ideal for transporting large, heavy edifices, and the general perception of prefabricated homes being... not so great... due to seeing prefabbed mobile homes and the lack of quality that's incredibly common in that industry, amongst numerous other reasons. What has seemed to really change things recently are "SIPs" - Structural Insulated Panels - essentially prefabbed wall segments that you can then jinga together to make a home. They've become wildly popular in some parts of the country as they are easy to transport on the back of an 18-wheeler, easy to install with or without a construction crane, and take care of multiple construction steps at once, greatly reducing build times. They can often be more energy efficient too, as they have fewer seams and the insulation is applied more evenly (often an expanding foam is used instead of fiberglass, which also boosts the R value by quite a bit).