Marmol Radziner Prefab

We loved how the concrete floors in the Desert House looked, but we shied away from using them in our first few projects that we produced in our own factory. The Desert House’s concrete were so beautiful, but also so heavy, which made the installation quite challenging. For the design of the Palms House, we wanted to use concrete floors on the first floor for the public spaces in the house. We spent time researching lighter concrete options to make this work.

In the end, we decided to design a different flooring system. At the Desert House, the concrete was both the structural floor for the home and the finish floor material. At the Palms House, we are using Structural Insulation Panels (SIPs) as the structural sub-floor, allowing us to pour the concrete as a thinner, topping slab. This approach both shaves two inches off the depth of the concrete (and therefore a lot of weight!) and allows the house to reap the environmental benefits of SIPs panels. We have staged the modules through our factory so that every Friday a module is ready for the concrete pour. Once we pour, our factory team trowels the wet concrete to create the smooth finish that we want. Then the modules sit over the weekend and cure. Come Monday morning, the modules slide on to the next station in our factory to start the next phase of production.

Thanks so much for visiting our new blog. We hope to post regularly on a range of topics, including the various projects that we currently have in design and production, events around the country, or just interesting articles and ideas that influence what we do. You can subscribe to our blog by clicking here. We hope that you’ll enjoy learning more about the process behind our prefab homes and more.

In the coming months, we’ll be blogging a lot about the Palms House (a.k.a. Venice House). This house is currently in our factory and will be delivered to a small, urban lot this spring. We designed to house to respond to the narrow, infill site by having the home look inwards towards small, private courtyard spaces. This allowed us to maintain an open, bright feeling that connects indoor and outdoor spaces despite the small lot.