Tiny Homes

All of Scott Palamar’s selections and customizations brought the total to $150,000 for the 640-square-foot home and surrounding land. “I feel like I struck on such a novel solution because I was able to afford a home tailored to my lifestyle,” he says.

The house has two modules: a living space on the left and a utilities, laundry, and outdoor kitchen on the right.

The roofline of the Tind house prototype, designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune for prefab company Fiskarhedenvillan, has more conventional Swedish gables than the flat-roofed modernism of typical prefab units.

The weeHouse exteriors are clad in corrugated Cor-Ten, but with a custom pattern of folds to create an organic randomness. The foundations were designed with a shallow recess around the top to make the modules look like they’re hovering. After they bought the property in early 2014, the Siegels camped there for two summers while they saved up money and planned a permanent structure. In his research, BJ came across this design, a customizable prefab house by Alchemy Architects. "Of all the things that I found, I was drawn to that one because it was absolutely the simplest and cleanest," he says.

#Honomobo M.05

This house has an exterior of black panels and clear-grain cedar tongue-and-groove siding, and a rooftop deck that lets its owners enjoy the outdoors.

Big dreams of downsizing? Check out these affordable tiny homes.

A typical Lake|Flato Porch House can be completed in approximately 12 months with construction costs running from $300 to $350 per square foot.

The living room extends into the great outdoors with a spruce deck.

Cube by NOMAD Micro Homes measures 13.5' x 13.5' x 13.5' and is currently available for $38,800 on Amazon. The eco-conscious home, which comes with instructions for do-it-yourself assembly, can be flat-packed and shipped worldwide.

“Stacey hopes that we can use this as a prototype for a development of artists’ studios someday—we talked about maybe siting several of them together, like an old mobile home park.” The steel sculpture is by San Antonio artist George Shroeder.

Transforming shipping containers into habitable spaces is a growingly popular subset of prefab. Just off the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, Martha Moseley and Bill Mathesius adapted an unused concrete foundation to create a home made from 11 stacked shipping containers. "We were inspired by the site, and our desire to have something cool and different," says Moseley.

Owner Stacey Hill was instantly drawn to this shipping container’s existing blue color and chose to leave it unchanged. Architect Jim Poteet added floor-to-ceiling sliding doors to allow light in, as well as a cantilevered overhang to shade a window on the left side, which houses a small garden storage area.

Located on New Zealand’s North Island along the Coromandel Peninsula, this timber-clad shipping container house by Crosson Clarke Carnachan Architects captures the simplicity of living with nature. An open-plan layout extends the interior toward the surrounding landscape and ocean, while a built-in mechanism reveals a drop-down deck on one side of the unique holiday home.

In addition to saving on construction costs, upcycling an old container can be an eco-friendly alternative to building from the ground up.