Sticks & Stones / Steel & Glass. Anthony Poon
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it possible to design and build affordable, “green,” and exceptional single-family housing in an age of cookie-cutter housing and bottom-line developers? It turns out the answer is yes. With creativity, luck, and an exciting vision, “production housing,” also known as tract housing, can be cool, modern, and luxurious, even for the masses.
Ever since humankind transitioned from a nomadic life to clustered settlements, families have yearned for free-standing solid structures composed of local materials. Most often shelters went up alongside similar structures for reasons of cost and availability of building blocks, be they mud, clay, brick, thatch, or wood. With time and resources, the same yearning stretched toward the creation of unique family homes, a way to stand out and signal prosperity. As the centuries cycled through population growth and economic swings, we found our way back to the need for mass-produced homes that could go up quickly and efficiently. We have seen this in several waves in the United States over the past seventy years alone.
We are all familiar with the post–World War II housing boom. William Levitt & Sons built new towns for returning GIs and their families seemingly overnight on rich farmland and in pine forests east of New York City and along the East Coast. These communities consisted of houses that were identical save for the paint color. In short order, Americans burst their way south and west. Single-family homes went up in quick succession from Florida to California, on marsh and desert as well as farmland. That this second wave was almost too big for the banks to handle, and that these were the homes purchased and lost in the recent mortgage bubble, doesn’t change the ever-present demand for affordable single-family homes, each with the moat of a lawn. Trees optional.
While we have all seen firsthand or in photos and movies the seeming sameness of row upon row of identical homes in America’s blossoming suburbs, buyers still had the option to choose from a menu of interior variations, entry features, and other simple ways to put a personal stamp on their home. The same is true of prefab homes that we see off the highway, or in halves on the highway trailered behind a semitruck.
This type of tract housing is based on the concept of prototypes. An architect would design four prototypical designs for a community of a hundred homes. These prototypes would have variations and upgrades, such as a swimming pool, an extra bedroom, a sound system, a security system, or fancier cabinetry. The prototypes would come in a few exterior colors and landscape choices. Along with other facade options like an arch, a trellis, or a porch, the completed community would not look like a tract of the same four homes repeated monotonously; rather, you could get three to four dozen different-looking homes. Sort of.
For Poon Design, this industry of production housing was a new kind of client, a different kind of business, and an entirely distinctive kind of architecture. The architectural team at Poon Design was vastly experienced with custom homes from the West Coast to the East Coast as well as in the south of France. These projects contrasted in every way with the premise of production homes.
We were limited as experts in speculative homes where the buyer was only a hypothetical idea. In our usual projects, a client hired us and we designed a single, special custom home. In addition, the custom homes we designed were larger, were more complex, and had a bigger budget than was typically seen in the production housing industry. As an example, a production home might sell for $400,000 to $800,000, on average, in the areas where we were to work. The custom homes that we designed sold for $2 million to $100 million. Production homes are affordable, average-sized homes, often for a first-time or retired buyer, or perhaps for someone purchasing a weekend home.
When developer Andrew Adler, CEO of Alta Verde Group of Beverly Hills, approached us with a vision for modern production housing, we found the challenge presented by this new client fascinating and the philosophical goals worthwhile. Poon Design was interested in honing our exclusive design talents to provide sensational visionary homes for the mainstream U.S. home buyer. We wanted to find ways to distill and translate good design for an industry of prototypes, repetition, mass production, fast construction schedules, and economical budgets. After decades of designing expensive homes for the wealthy, we strongly believed in creating an approach that would offer creative concepts and great design to everyone.
For a client paying us to construct a custom home, a budget of $1,000 per square foot would be considered typical, though extravagant for many. It is not difficult to execute a nice estate with such a generous budget. When a developer suggests that his production homes are to be constructed for one-tenth that amount—$100 per square foot—our most creative skills must come into play. How do we achieve results similar to a custom residence for a fraction of the amount?
Though we had the advantage of saving money in construction due to building in volume with production housing, we still needed a host of creative and strategic ideas. Building a dozen homes at one time, as compared to a single home, would no doubt offer discounts in construction labor and materials, but a volume discount alone would not create the enormous savings that our developer client needed.
A house is a home, and everyone should have a chance to own one, if that is their desire. Even the predictable traditional developers endeavored to artificially mirror local tastes, from clay tile roofs in the Southwest to gabled windows reminiscent of a perceived New England tradition. We were eager to meet the challenge.
We boldly believed that the next possible wave of a housing movement should be based around the idea that the essential qualities of upscale modern residences could be delivered to the mainstream marketplace at affordable prices.
In truth, for me, it all simply started at a party.
One evening after work in early 2008, Poon Design was hosting an informal office party for friends and colleagues to show off our expanded office space and new graphic design studio. We left our doors open to easily greet visitors.
A new neighbor had just moved into the adjacent office suite. As he was leaving his office, he heard our music, saw food, drinks, and a group of people enjoying themselves, and wandered in to introduce himself.
Andrew Adler looked around our studio, examined the giant glossy prints of our projects, studied our conference room with a presentation from earlier in the day and work areas littered with remnants of the week’s creative process, and talked to a few architects in the room.
Adler found me and said, “We could do great projects together, and we should talk.”
Adler and his newly formed residential development company, Alta Verde Group, had exciting ideas. He had previously developed successful urban infill condominiums and apartments in Texas, garnishing a myriad of accolades for breaking boundaries in housing design and urban development. He had just relocated to build and sell residential homes in Southern California after the real estate crash of 2007.
The country’s economy was slipping fast into a recession, and distressed land was available at reasonable prices to purchase and develop. In some cases, such land was already destined for detailed communities, with roads, sewer, and electrical lines already in place to service surveyed plats awaiting beautiful new homes. The business model was for a developer to build the homes at his or her risk, with the intention to sell them at a profit. In most cases, this common speculative plan was successful, but in an economic downturn, many developers’ plans went unrealized. The land remained vacant, and cleared land was selling at bargain prices.
Alta Verde was looking to buy this land and construct homes, but with an all-new, innovative approach. Adler envisioned cutting-edge design, unique but affordable materials, and yes, environmentally conscious structures. He imagined clean lines, uninterrupted glass walls, and dramatic interior spaces—all on a budget. Adler saw in the work on our walls a sympathetic creative partner in Poon Design. In our custom-built residences, he could see our desire to do things differently—to accommodate while engaging an artistic process.
We knew that with so much cool, advanced, and affordable design in every device from cars to laptops, the new generation of home buyers would expect the same in their homes, but at reasonable prices, especially in California.
For the Alta Verde project, we banned the words “prefab” or “tract home” from our lexicon; those words simply would not fly with our client.
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