Prefabricated homes have long been touted as the solution to so many of the challenges facing housing. From affordability, to sustainability, to quality – the value prefab construction promises to dwellers is high. It makes sense then, that architects who are focused on these qualities would look to modular prefabrication techniques to make an impact. With a penchant for innovation, architect Geoffrey Warner found his way into the prefab movement early, and managed to turn an experimental one-off project into a popular iterative series of homes which are as energy efficient as they are attractive. Warner’s firm Alchemy Architects first created the weeHouse® as a customizable dwelling that showcases what Warner calls “the luxury of less.” Now he’s building a new project, dubbed the lightHouse, as a way to further popularize modular housing.

Based in St. Paul, Minnesota, the firm produced its first prefab dwelling in 2003 when a client asked Warner to build her a retreat on a rural plot of land in Wisconsin, for under $50,000. “We said you could have a pole barn—a big thing with nothing in it—or a jewel box with no plumbing or electricity that we would build ourselves in a warehouse. Everyone thought that the jewel box was the way to go,” he says. “It wasn’t a plan, it grew out of needing to solve a problem, and prefab was the tool we thought might be a way to do that, to save money and to save time.”