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12.9.2016 | DIGS.NET 23 30 homes since its start—and has just opened a dedicated manufacturing plant in Rialto, California, an hour east of downtown Los Angeles. A Plant of Their Own Given the caliber of the LivingHomes product—the luxury tier of pre-fab homes—the brand's new facility, Plant Prefab, has increasingly become an essential part of the business. Previously, S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y Steve Glenn's eco-conscious LivingHomes gets more vertical with a new factory and its first development W R I T T E N BY C O N S TA N C E D U N N P H OTO S C O U R T ES Y O F L I V I N G H O M ES E XC E P T W H E R E N OT E D Ten years later, the downturn, or what Glenn terms a "nuclear winter in home building" has thawed, thanks to an improved real-estate and building climate, plus an increase in awareness around environmentally sustainable construction and energy efficient homes. "In the last three years we've grown a lot," he reports. LivingHomes currently has 45 projects under contract—no small feat given the company's grand total of the firm had outsourced the production of its homes—which are created in modules then shipped to a client's site for assembly, nearly always in one day— to various factories around the country. Not an ideal way to realize LivingHome's sophisticated designs, which generally require a certain level of customization. "Plant Prefab is going to make it much, much easier for us to build our quality," says Glenn. Designed around executing high-quality, sustainable design, Plant Prefab will construct not only the modules used in LivingHome's projects, but those of other architects, designers and builders looking to execute on their environmentally responsible designs. "It has huge potential," Glenn says of the facility. Plant Prefab will no doubt also expand upon a big pragmatic plus of choosing a LivingHomes product: speed. "Once permitting is done, it is reasonable to assume that the construction phase will be half the time of a regular build," says Matt Langton, who coordinates sales and operations for the company. It's Friday afternoon and Langton is serving as info- packed docent for the public weekly tour offered each week at Glenn's personal residence, which happens to be a living, breathing model of RK1—the company's first, and most premium, model. The LEED Platinum-certified home, the first In 2006, entrepreneur Steve Glenn started a company. The idea was great—eco- friendly pre-fabricated homes. The timing was not. "It was just a year and change before the beginning of the worst real estate downturn since the Great Depression," says the entrepreneur, sitting at his desk in LivingHomes' modest Santa Monica office. B E A U T I F U L (Above) is modular LEED Platinum Greenbuild LivingHome (Model CK5.4) was permanently installed in New Orleans' 9th Ward for Make It Right, a non-prot founded by Brad Pitt to develop sustainable, aordable housing in New Orleans and other parts of the country.