As regular readers know, sooner or later we’re planning on building on our property on Pender Island. Our eventual plan is to also build a separate, small guest cabin. We like our family and friends, but we also like our personal space, if you get my meaning.
We’re not opposed to the guest cabin being some kind of mobile home, assuming it’s comfortable and kind of cool. This one, from Sustain miniHome might fit the bill:
All for about CAN $120,000 at the base price. And, importantly, there would be not duty costs because it’s a Canadian company. They seem to be based in Toronto–how much does it cost to ship a tiny house across the country?
On a related note, why is it that every architect I hear about is an ‘award-winning’ one? Is it as easy to win awards in architecture as it is in the technology industry? Because of its over-use, the phrase seems totally hollow. Maybe I want to work with an architect who’s won no awards and is proud of it?
Via this Wired promotion, I visited LivingHomes.net. They make great looking pre-fab, eco-friendly homes. I was immediately impressed by how they’d built their site. It’s totally Flashy Flash and the Flash bunch, but it’s artfully done and reasonably easy to navigate.
When you first visit the home page, you’re presented with a wonderful time-lapse video of light passing through a living room. It’s a subtle and brilliant approach, and a really pure expression of what architecture and interior design are all about. I was immediately reminded of a lovely time-lapse film of the Waterfall Building that entranced me as part of the Arthur Erickson exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
The tour is narrated by Steve Glenn, the company owner. He takes you on a friendly tour of his own home, pointing out the home’s features, but also cracking little jokes and pointing out the Lego he still has from his childhood. There are also plenty of visual cues to click and navigate through the tour.
It helps that the product itself–the homes–are gorgeous, but I was really impressed by the elegant, functional site design.
Their pricing is pretty steep, but I guess that’s what it costs to build a reasonably guilt-free home. Like so many of these cool, modern, prefab home companies, they’re based in the States. The duty to ship a house across the border makes it financially impractical, but we already know a local architect who does a lot of this style of work with prefab elements.
