Perfect prefab
This is an excerpt from an article in Sanctuary magazine issue 5.
One autumn day, when the broad Western Plains views were delivering the full “sunlit plains” cliche, a semi-trailer backed down Judy Cameron and Graeme Webb’s driveway and dropped off their living room/kitchen, bedroom and ensuite.
A couple of hours later, a second semi delivered the other part of the couple’s new 11-square home—an interconnecting module containing an entry foyer, laundry, a main bathroom (with ensuite), an open study and a guest bedroom for the children and grandchildren.
Both fully-fitted-out modules were set down on 14 steel-screw pylons, which made for a very light footprint on the scenically spectacular site located on the border of the Otway Ranges forests and the volcanic plains southwest of Melbourne.
While it took the drivers and the five on-site workers only a couple of hours to set down and set up this prefabricated, sustainable house, it took a couple more days to connect the blackwater and greywater systems. After that, realising this fully-functioning home was simply a case of adding water!
Judy was so thrilled that her instant house was exactly what she’d envisioned, she could have moved in then and there—only a practical consideration stopped her. “It took a month longer, because we had to have water in the tank.”
As empty-nesters, the couple decided to realise their dream of swapping a big, conventional house in Geelong to live simply and sustainably, with a five-acre permaculture garden, in a rural place with magnificent views and a sense of like-minded community.
They opted to go the pre-fab route for the simple reason that the whole region is in the throes of gang-buster development and they couldn’t find a builder interested in doing a small sustainable house. “My neighbour couldn’t even get a builder to quote!” recalls Judy.
While it took two years of ground-work to secure the right site, it took mere minutes of internet-work to find what they were looking for in prefabricated housing.
Following online recommendations, Judy found a new Melbourne company called Modscape, which is creating sustainable prefabricated housing in a western suburbs factory. She inspected Modscape’s display units at the factory, and walked into one that she “could just see on the block. I just had to have it!”
Modscape was formed in 2006 by four mates who knew each other either through university or the commercial construction industry. Collectively, Jan Gyrn, Stefan Seketa, Dan Larkey and Paul Fellows have experience in project management, design and construction that has been honed on large-scale developments. “But to me it seemed ludicrous that domestic brick and terracotta architecture was still not being built with core sustainable principles,” recalls Jan.
Having been born in Japan, where prefabrication is not unusual, and exposed to domestic building practices in Denmark, the United States and Canada “where 20 per cent of the population lives in prefabs” Jan was fascinated by prefabricated domestic architecture. Its practical side appealed to him, too, as it promised a way of achieving streamlined minimalism and sustainability, all with minimal impact on the environment.
