From: treehugger.com

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 02. 2.10

I first heard of Blu Homes when they purchased the intellectual assets of Michelle Kaufmann back at the end of September. There was not a lot of information about them at the time, and having been in the modular home business and I had a lot of questions. I recently interviewed Maura McCarthy, co-founder and VP of Sales and Marketing, and got a lot of answers.

The Limitations of Modular

Modular homes are built out of boxes that cannot exceed approved dimensions for transport on public roads, usually up to 16' wide x 62' long. This creates real design limitations. Transporting such a big box is very expensive; one needs special permits and escort vehicles, often even police escort. Once on site, the modules are place on a foundation and "stitched" together- finishing the flooring, wiring them to the panels, patching the drywall between modules. This can take up to two weeks per module.

To reduce shipping costs, manufacturers sometimes do panellized versions, where instead of shipping so much air, they build the house as panels and put them together on site. This requires most of the drywalling to be done on site, and takes a lot longer to finish on site.

Because of the costs of shipping the big boxes and the time it took to finish, modular housing developed as a local business, with most manufacturers never going further than a five hundred mile radius from the factory; it just cost too much money. Green modern design is a small niche in the housing market, so you have to be able to travel; there are too few people in the usual range to make it a viable business.

Modular Goes Origami

Blu Homes are a very clever hybrid between modular homes and panellized homes, a partial box with folding panels that beat the problems that plague the traditional industry.

The idea of the folding, easy-to-transport home isn't new; Carl Koch designed the first Acorn home to fold up, back in 1947. But they gave up on the idea because they couldn't work around the building code problems. Blu Homes has, by using conventional materials and assemblies. There are some real advantages:

1) They fold. This is the single biggest advance in the industry in years. Get down to 8'-6 wide and transport is as cheap as hauling a transport trailer, meaning the homes can go anywhere in the country. Getting up to 20' wide inside changes opens up the opportunities for design.

This plan has a 22'x20' open plan living, dining and kitchen. In a traditional modular home it would be made from two pieces with a double truss between the two. And the ability to get two bedrooms of reasonable size at one end of one module- never been done before, period.

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