Two amazing prefabricated Sonoma County homes featured in 'Prefabulous Small Houses'

Author Sheri Koones believes that prefab houses are the homes of the future, or “prefabulous,” as she calls them. She’s written five books about them.

In the new “Prefabulous Small Houses” (The Taunton Press), Koones focuses on modestly sized homes and cottages, between 350 and 2,500 square feet.

“It is definitely possible to live large but on a small footprint without cramping your style or budget,” she said in an Associated Press interview.

Compared to the basic modular homes of a decade ago, Koones says, these prefab residences are more elegant, eco-friendly and economical. Unlike traditional, on-site home building, they can be put up in a matter of days or weeks.

The book profiles 32 homes across the country, including two in Sonoma County - a 1,600-square-foot house commissioned by a Sonoma woman for her elderly mother and a 1,670-square-foot factory constructed home in Cloverdale for a pair of avid cyclists who wanted to get out of the fog and downsize from their longtime home in San Francisco.

Excerpts from interviews with The Press Democrat and The Associated Press follow.

Q. How did this book come about?

A. I’ve been writing about prefab construction for a long time. If you’re going to write about energy-efficient, sustainable homes, it really has to be prefab. The technology has come so incredibly far in recent years. And the more I traveled and looked around, the more I saw that there was a trend toward living smaller and focusing on travel and other things instead of pouring all your time and resources into your home.

Today, almost anything that can be built on-site can be built prefab. In Japan, most of the houses are prefabricated, and in Australia many of them are. We’re slowly going in that direction, too.

Q. The homes featured in your book look very expensive. How economical are small, prefab homes?

A. Prefab houses can cost from 5 percent to 15 percent less than an on-site built house. And we know that building prefab saves time and energy in the construction process and also in terms of maintenance. You wouldn’t want someone to dump a bunch of car parts in your driveway and build a car there, so why would you want a home built that way? It’s so wasteful.

Q. What design elements do these homes use to help them feel comfortable and roomy despite their diminutive size?

A. High ceilings, limited hallways and rooms used for multiple purposes are elements shared by many of the homes featured in this book. The emphasis is on living well as opposed to living big.

Q. How has the process of factory-built housing changed since you started writing about them in 2000?

A. People were making very boxy, simple houses. Then people started thinking that they would like a prefab, but they wanted it custom and they wanted an architect to design it. Companies started gearing up to build more intricate houses.

Today’s prefabs are nothing like they used to be. A lot of companies are doing very sophisticated homes that are energy conscious. Now you can pick a house and have it customized from a company or ask an architect to draw the plans. Most of the houses in the book were individually designed.

Q. How did you persuade Robert Redford to write the forward?

A. I approached him when I was doing “Prefabulous and Sustainable.” I wanted to have a forward by a person I felt was one of the most important environmentalists in the county. I was determined to get him, and I was very tenacious. I went though his publicist and eventually found somebody who knew him. I sent a few chapters of what I was doing. When he saw what I was doing, he was so pleased. He’s done the forward for three of my books.

Q. Can you talk a little about the new technologies that are becoming available?

A. I am wowed by the houses created by students for the Solar Decathlon, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy every two years. These are really the architects, builders and manufacturers of the future. Three of the amazing homes in the book feature important Solar Decathlon innovations. The SU+RE House, built by a team at Stevens Institute of Technology, is designed to withstand the next hurricane on the New Jersey shore, and because it uses marine technology instead of stilts, it’s easier to access for a wider range of people. And the DesertSol House, built by students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, finds creative ways to save water and use it for cooling.

Q. What are the biggest misperceptions about prefab housing?

A. People still think of it as cheap and boxy. But if I were building a house today, it’s the only kind I would consider. All of the elegant houses in this book were custom-built and are anything but plain. Each is clearly unique and special.

Q. What are the advantages of a prefabricated home?

A. You can take them to areas where materials and workmen are more scarce. Everything is put together in the factory and just trucked up to the location and put together. I show an example where the house is on an island. They could not have built a house through conventional means because they could not get the materials or there workmen there.

Pretty much anything you could build on site you can build prefabricated. I had a situation where people were planning to build on their site, but the permits were coming too slowly and they couldn’t finish in time. But they could build prefabricated.

Q. What is the environmental advantage of prefabricated homes?

A. When you build on site all the excess materials go into the dumpster, materials the homeowner is paying for. When it’s built in the factory those parts can be recycled.

Q. What did you like in particular about the Sonoma residence (designed and built by Connect Homes)?

A. It’s wonderful in that it was built for an elderly woman by her daughter, who lives on the property. She wanted to make the house as friendly for her mother as she could. Everything is on one level. There are no barriers. She doesn’t do a whole lot of cooking, so the appliances are small. The dishwasher is a drawer-style.

Connect Homes’ owners Jared Levy and Gordon Stott designed a house to work for the client that is simple, clean and easy to maintain.

Press Democrat Staff Writer Meg McConahey and Associated Press writer Katherine Ross contributed to this story.