The Anywhere House on Business Insider

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This home made out of tiny units can be built in any configuration and proves prefab architecture doesn't have to be boring

It's terrific to have an article in Business Insider about The Anywhere House. There have been a couple of articles about the Anywhere House in major publications in the last few weeks and we are now in conversation with people from Israel, Egypt, Sweden, Italy, USA, Panama… the list goes on and on. A giant thank you to Mary Meisenzahl for shining a light on a project that I am very proud of, it’s really appreciated.

The Anywhere House

Following the publicity whirlwind that engulfed Joshua Tree in the autumn of 2017 we started receiving enquiries about whether the house could be reproduced en masse, or whether we had a design that could be purchased off the shelf. People were making enquiries for holiday resorts in Jordan, or a series of Airbnb retreats across the United States, or sometimes just wanting to buy a unique prefabricated holiday house for Aspen or the Hamptons.

I think a lot of these enquiries came about because the Joshua Tree Residence is created out of shipping containers, so people maybe perceived it as easily transportable. The joy of that
project though is taking something that is highly generic and transportable, and turning that into something very unique and site specific.

Basically, if I was going to design a mass produce-able house the Joshua Tree Residence wouldn’t be it. But that raises the question, what would be my answer to a prefabricated, modular house?

The starting point was that I wanted there to be the potential that no two homes look the same - every client’s home to be unique. And I wanted to create a design that, using standard elements, could create a 5 bed hilltop house or a 1 bed lake edge villa, associated with a hotel.

So far we've designed 3 different bedroom units, a living room unit, a kitchen unit, a bathroom unit and a study unit, and with time this will be expanded upon. Each unit has two or more openings that can be the point of connection to the next unit, or can be capped with a window or door. So every time you add another unit there are at least 2 orientations for that unit, and with no limit on how many units you can daisy chain together there is an infinite number of possibilities. Each unit has been constrained to dimensions that are transportable by road to allow them to be completely fabricated off-site.

We are currently working towards building the first Anywhere House in spring 2019 on the side of a lake in Alberta, Canada.

The Anywhere House was recently on Dezeen and you can read the article here.