Tim Pyne’s m-house
We recently brought you the m-hotel by architect Tim Pyne which will go up later this year in London. The m-house is an earlier project that has won accolades in the British press.
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Hotel Everland: 1-room Prefab Hotel
Hotel Everland is a prefab Swiss art exhibit that has been in several locations around the world. Until December of this year, it is placed in Paris at the Palais de Tokyo with tremendous views of the city. The hotel has one room and allows stays of up to one night at rates of £313/night. The hotel offers a minibar in lieu of room service and encourages guests to steal its embroidered towels.
Das Griffner Haus - Griffner Homes
Griffner Homes is a company based in Germany that will produce prefabricated homes based on bespoke designs created for clients, standard designs, as well as those created by outside architects. Like many European prefab companies, they ship throughout Europe.
Huf Haus
Four years ago, Channel4’s programme Grand Designs highlighted the Huf Haus in an excellent episode where an elderly couple demolished their 1956 custom home in order to build a new German, prefabricated home: a customised Huf Haus. Grand Designs recently re-aired the episode with an update, showing the home four years later and discussing it with the owners. If you are in the UK, we highly recommend trying to track down the episode.
Ikea Boklok Prefab News
Ikea has now put together an informative website that highlights their intentions with the planned Boklok developments across Europe. Additionally, there are several country-specific sites for Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and the UK.
Secondly, the Guardian has thorough coverage of Ikea’s Boklok move into the UK,
Expansion into the UK is a big step for BoKlok, but a logical one. It was conceived in 1996 in response to similar housing conditions to those of present-day UK: demand outstripping supply, rising prices, not enough homes being built at the affordable end of the market. Initially, the BoKlok team turned not to architects but to researchers. They tracked trends in the dwindling size of the average Swedish household, and identified the model BoKlok homeowner: a female single parent with one child, no car and an average income. They then studied how much she could afford in rent, and set their budgets accordingly. Surveys conducted at Ikea stores across Sweden revealed their potential customers’ housing priorities: the desire to live in secure, small-scale surroundings; proximity to the countryside; contact with neighbours; and homes that were light, well-planned, functional and furnished with natural materials.
