Modular Can Be High End

Prefab or manufactured homes may conjure up images of a double-wide mobile home. But that is a misconception.

Ty Sharp, a 26-year-old software consultant from Aspen, Colo., is building a 2,876-square-foot vacation home in Ventura, Calif. The four-bedroom, four-bathroom custom home, for which he’s paying $1.695 million, will have an open-concept floor plan, a chef’s kitchen, engineered hardwood floors and a master bedroom with a private patio and soaking tub.

But if you visit the quarter-acre site, which has views of the Pacific Ocean, you’ll find only a foundation despite the fact that the home is slated for completion within two months. That is because Mr. Sharp’s new house, a prefabricated modular home, is being manufactured in a factory two hours away.

Joseph Tanney, a founder of Resolution 4 Architecture in New York City, who has been designing modular homes since 2002, said today’s modular homes can be very high end. A seven-bedroom, nine-bathroom modular home that Mr. Tanney designed in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and which was completed in 2018, has a pool, pool house, decking, geothermal- and solar-power systems and a green roof. It sold in Sept. 2020 for its full asking price: $4.695 million.

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