If your first thoughts are of cookie cutter design and quick, cheap construction when someone mentions prefabricated housing you’re not alone.

But things are changing, and architects’ long fascination with systemizing and simplifying building construction (by doing it off-site in a factory controlled environment) has resulted in prefab homes that offer a level of quality that’s hard to match with site-built construction and have a smaller carbon footprint.

“You save money in construction time and risk in exposure (materials not being exposed to the elements while building) and reduce waste significantly,” says Oliver Lang of Vancouver’s Lang Wilson Practice in Architecture Culture.

“You get precision and tolerances that you can’t get on a normal site, which increases the performance of the building envelope and therefore the building.”

Lang and his wife and business partner Cynthia Wilson decided to put their prefabricated home system to the test a few years ago by making their Monad prototype their home.

Constructed off-site, including the balconies, it was shipped in and slotted above their office on West 4th Avenue so fast it caused a neighbour taking out the trash to do a double-take at the building that had appeared overnight.

Wilson refers to it as “the sky home” and indeed it feels like you are up among the clouds — or better still, clear blue skies — with two single apartments sitting above the office and then Lang and Wilson’s double storey penthouse on top.

Light and airy, the feeling is all glass and yet on one of Vancouver’s warmest June afternoons this year it feels comfortably cool.

The approach the pair took in developing their sky home model addresses Vancouver’s need for urban infill housing, with natural ventilation and light being key. Their prefabricated system is being used to build 14 homes on a single family section in Vancouver —

“Most urban densification in our cities will happen along arteries and that’s just because the arteries are really commercial so you don’t get the political resistance of single family owners ...” says Lang.

The problem with this, says Lang, is that most will have south-facing units onto a noisy environment, and these units heat up in summer because residents cannot comfortably open windows.

“How do you convince people not to commute out into the suburbs, with aspirations of a larger home that’s quiet when all you offer are really poorly conceived homes?” he says.

Lang and Wilson’s system places the bedroom away from the road, no matter what size the home, facing onto a courtyard to allow for cross ventilation year-round.

Incorporating prefabricated panels into the construction of their custom homes has proved key for Lanefab Design/Build founders Bryn Davidson and Mat Turner.

“You get a more energy-efficient place,” says Davidson. “All of our projects for the last five or six years have been built well beyond the building code, our standard wall is about 13-inches thick and we’ve been doing that on all projects, even the basic rental units, so we try to save energy wherever we can and the prefab components are a big part of that.”

Energy savings don’t get much more remarkable than homes built to the Passive House (Passivhaus) standard set in Germany and adopted by local companies like Pemberton’s BC Passive House, who prefabricate panels for a home’s exterior envelope and middle floors.