During the run up to closing on the purchase of our lot in August ’15 we had the idea to build a modern home, roughly 2500 square feet and probably 3 bedrooms and 2.5 baths, comfortable for the two of us, a nice guest bedroom, and a third bedroom for that or for an office or other. When we told the broker selling us the lot about this he suggested we take a look at Turkel Design, who he said designed some nice looking modern homes and offered affordable prefabricated construction. We looked and we liked and were initially drawn to their Axiom 2340 model, which ended up being the starting point for our design.
Big decision though, so we wanted to do our due diligence and explore some other options. We couldn’t find any local architects with experience with modern homes, but heard “I have always wanted to do a modern home” a few times, and while local would have been nice (for design, oversight, local knowledge and relationships) we were not entirely comfortable being a guinea pig. There was a nice looking modern home we could see from our lot that was designed by Maryanne Thompson, similar size to what we were planning, but we tracked down the owner and construction cost of about $2 million scared us away (it did have geothermal and solar panels, but still …). An old high school classmate who is a partner at a small high end firm told us we should plan on $600psf for coastal Connecticut, which still scared us! So this reinforced the idea of modern prefab, we went and met with a Lindal representative, Turkey has partnered with them for some designs in their “TD3 Series,” but we preferred Turkel’s Axiom designs and the idea of stick-built prefab did not resonate. We also popped in to NYC to meet the principals of Resolution 4, we very much liked their body of work. A little “boxier” than Turkel’s designs, perhaps driven by their focus on modular prefab construction. We also looked briefly at Stillwater, and I don’t remember if we looked at them then, but if we were doing this again I might look at them now, evoDOMUS. After boiling the ocean for a bit we landed back with Turkel, we liked their designs, the panelized prefab approach made sense to us, we bought into the timing/quality/predictability rationale for the approach, and they initially suggested a budget that was attractive but that we knew was low, but we thought maybe we could get it done in the same zip code.
Here are the before and after photos:
