A small development of townhouses has just been built in Atwater Village—but we'll forgive you if you've failed to notice any delays around the construction site. Each home only took about five hours to construct, meaning it might have been a bare foundation when you drove by the Glendale Boulevard corner in the morning, and then a completed building on your way home from work.
As Inhabitat reports, this is made possible by the Santa Monica-based company LivingHomes, who specializes in modern prefabricated housing. The components of the buildings are made in Oregon and delivered to the destination by a construction crane. From there, the parts are fitted together swiftly and a fully-formed unit appears—for as low as $275,000 and as much as $482,000 (though, that doesn't include the plot of land you're building on). The final price for these units on the Atwater Village site will be just under $900,000, according to Jerry Hoffman of RLG Properties who are selling the homes.
Don’t presume anything when you hear the term "prefabricated." In this case, each of the units is three-stories tall with three bedrooms and three bathrooms, a 376-square-foot private backyard and even city and mountain views. All the fixtures, counters, windows and flooring come with the units and are already in place, ready to go when the pieces of the buildings arrive at their intended plot.
The LivingHomes units are all designed for “cradle to cradle” sustainability in every facet, from how the wood timber used is sourced to the LEED Platinum certification for energy efficiency. Rooftop solar panels provide power to the houses, which need only be plugged into the city electric and water grids and are instantly livable. With as quick and easy as it seems to be, maybe the next time we have a free afternoon, we’ll build one of our own.