Step Inside the First "Ikea House"

To answer your question about an Ikea-inspired prefabricated home: No, you won't need an Allen wrench.

The production folks at Ideabox already had their share of the Allen wrench?filled assembly, however. The Oregon-based design?build firm is the company behind Aktiv (Swedish for "active"), the Ikea-stocked prefab home that hit the news last week and presumably gave hope to all those people who ever walked into an Ikea showroom and thought, I'll take it. As an added bonus, its production team pieces together the bits of Swedish plywood furniture for anyone who buys one of these things. "[Our] guys are sharp, and it didn't take them long to adapt," Ideabox founder Jim Russell says. "They cranked it out."

Designing the Ikea House

Russell started Ideabox in Salem, Ore., more than six years ago, but he suddenly gained a following?thousands and thousands of emails in just a few days?when he unveiled the first-ever Ikea-inspired prefab home at a Portland home show last week. Contrary to what you may have read in the blogosphere, the Aktiv house isn't actually from Ikea, sanctioned by Ikea, or in any way sold through Ikea. However, the folks at the local Ikea in Portland certainly played a major role in coupling Russell's love of small-space prefab buildings with Ikea's design-savvy, space-saving systems. The collaboration yielded a home filled entirely with Ikea products.

As generations of cramped apartment-dwellers can attest, part of the Ikea allure (besides the fact that its furnishings are cheap and pack flat) is that the broad range of design options lets you get the most out of a small space. For example, Russell says, the variety of Ikea kitchen options gives customers design flexibility and the ability to mix and match Ikea products in the space, choosing for both style and cost. He designed the 745-square-foot one-bedroom, one-bathroom home around specific Ikea components, and the designers from the local Portland store worked directly with Ideabox to ensure the builders had all the parts they needed (there was no room for the frustration of a missing bolt on a commercial-scale project). In all, he says, building an Aktiv will cost about $86,500.

"We like our houses to pop," Russell says. "Our goal was to build a house that is very cool to be in and around, and our bent on modern design is to try and take advantage of what the prefab way of building offers in terms of size and volume."

Put Down the Instructions

If you buy a batch of furniture from Ikea, you spend the rest of the day trying to assemble it with the prepackaged screws and the occasionally baffling wordless instructions. But if you buy an Ikea-stock house from Ideabox, they do all that for you.

Like an ordinary home, a prefab requires a buildable site, a solid foundation, and the ability to hook into utilities. But rather than watching the home go up on-site, the first time a buyer sees it, it's assembled and coming to its new resting place on industry-standard rollers. (Or if the weight is too much for the rollers, it's crane-lifted into place and then bolted into the concrete foundation and sealed.)

The construction of the home gets done in a climate-controlled environment off-site, allowing the process to run quicker and smoother than a traditional build, Russell says. By eliminating the concern of the elements damaging the building process (soggy studs or damp insulation), portions of the home can be constructed simultaneously or in odd orders. For example, builders install the Ikea cabinets before the walls even go up. They also build the walls and floors concurrently, not limited by the constraints of the weather or typical timelines.

The major difference comes in the delivery of the home, forcing designers to engineer the structure for travel. "When you are picking up the house and driving it down the freeway, sheer loads are very important," Russell says. Thus, the house, just like a car, must be built with as unified a body construction as possible, ensuring that the home stays together in the face of winds on the highway, or transfers from the production shop to the truck or from the truck to the foundation. "There is a little more stealth factor," Russell says about the sleekness of the design.

Once the home gets delivered and is safely resting on the foundation, it is as close to a "plug-and-play" model as possible, requiring only hookups to the water, power, and sewer connection points, since all the wiring and plumbing was already done in the production facility. From there, the customer is free to walk into their new Aktiv space.

Just who are those customers? Russell, who normally designs larger prefab homes for clients looking for the streamlined and modern options available, says experimenting with Ikea on a small scale will appeal to those who want the modern European design in a small, affordable, cabin-equivalent space. Think of Aktiv as the Ikea version of prefab, he says: modern, cheaper, and easy to fit in tight spaces.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/architecture/step-inside-the-first-ikea-house-7186268?src=rss

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