Articles of Interest
A Very Model Modular
A prefab house with provenance goes on sale in Lake Chelan.By Sara daSilva
Sliding doors connect this sunny bedroom to a durable, low-maintenance deck made from a wood and plastic composite. Each Glidehouse bedroom has its own connection to an outside space. 
The glass-paneled Glidehouse opens up to a stunning view of the mountains, orchards and vineyards that surround silvery Lake Chelan. 
Handsome cedar sunshades on the Glidehouse exterior glide open and closed to regulate sun and provide privacy. 
Ten sliding glass panels and five clerestory windows work together to provide cross ventilation and cooling breezes in the great room—a good example of the energy-savvy architecture employed throughout the Glidehouse. 
The kitchen features formaldehyde-free cabinetry and concrete-look countertops made from Squak Mountain Stone, a composite product containing recycled paper. 
The Glidehouse blends warm materials, such as bamboo flooring and maple cabinetry, with simple silhouettes and lots of natural light to create a young, fresh take on modern. 
In the summertime, poolside views of the Lake Chelan valley encourage indoor/outdoor living. Kaufmann, who spent five years working for high-profile architect Frank O. Gehry, didn’t set out to build a prefab empire. Her initial goal was to find a decent, affordable home in the greater San Francisco area, a quest that turned out to be about as rewarding as searching for an igloo at the equator. Undaunted, Kaufmann and husband Kevin Cullen, a builder, mobilized The Little Red Hen construction plan—they would do it themselves, acting as architect and general contractor, respectively. As the avatar of their belief in simple, healthy and sustainable architecture rose slowly on a hillside in Novato, CA, Kaufmann began to pitch a similar design in a prefab package. Impressed, Sunset magazine offered to display a Glidehouse at their annual Menlo Park, CA, expo. A factory came on board and the first Glidehouse modules started rolling off the assembly line. Now, the only thing missing was a buyer.
Enter Andrew Reid, a Seattle-area mortgage lender, and the unlikely hero of a story about modern architecture. Andrew stumbled across the Glidehouse plans when Sunset approached his firm seeking corporate sponsorship of the Glidehouse exhibit. For Andrew and his wife, Kindra, a law school graduate, it was never about prefab. They simply fell in love with a house. From the drawings alone, both the Reids could envision the way the Glidehouse would combine warm materials, such as bamboo and cedar, with an abundance of natural light to create an inviting atmosphere—a discovery that prompted an about face in design philosophy. “I grew up in the Seattle area in traditional homes and I thought of modern as being cold and stark,” says Kindra, “until I saw the Glidehouse. But when Andrew first came home talking about buying this modern prefab, I thought he had bumped his head.”
The Reids had already been looking for a vacation home around Lake Chelan, a 55-mile stretch of icy blue water that cuts deep into the heart of the Cascade Mountains. So while Kaufmann tinkered with the Glidehouse blueprints, adding a bedroom and customizing the design to fit a new locale with more extreme weather, the Reids began searching in earnest, seizing every opportunity to drive the three hours East from Seattle and look at land. The third trip proved lucky. On a steep rise halfway up an undulating hillside, they found a lot with sweeping views of the lake crowned by two mountains the locals call Stormy and Bear.
Once the papers were signed, things moved fast. Just six months after closing on the land, the Reids were the owners of a completed Glidehouse. “We could have been in the house in four,” says Andrew. “But we added a deck and a swimming pool.” Incredibly, Michelle Kaufmann’s site-built Glidehouse, which broke ground six months earlier than the modular version, took an additional three months to complete.
Everyone agrees that prefab is faster than site-built, but that’s where the consensus stops. Rising real estate costs and a growing cultural appreciation of modern design have led to an explosion of prefab options in the past five years, and as the industry expands, so does the debate about its merits. As my husband and I sped alongside the narrow lake, as flat and bright as a blue satin ribbon in the winter sun, then turned onto the flank of a canyon that at one point develops into the deepest gorge in North America, I thought about the charges I’d heard levied against prefab construction. Some critics say modular houses are nothing more than glorified trailers, magnets for cheap materials and shoddy workmanship. Modern purists complain that since a prefab house isn’t designed for a specific site, it can never have a satisfying aesthetic relationship with nature. And I had a gripe of my own—ugliness. All too many of the modular houses I had seen were cement and steel boxes conjuring up visions of farm buildings and Soviet-bloc housing.
After winding two miles up into the foothills, we mounted a steep, snow-covered driveway. Any negative assumptions I might have had about prefab began to evaporate when I caught my first glimpse of the Glidehouse. Three lean rectangles strung together at angles, the Glidehouse has an unassuming elegance that springs from perfect proportions and the repetition of rectilinear forms. My first thought as I stepped inside and saw the lake lay framed in a phalanx of ten sliding glass panels, was that I couldn’t imagine a home fitting into this simple, high-desert landscape more beautifully.
Dollar for dollar, the Reids’ Glidehouse didn’t turn out to be any cheaper than a site-built home in the same location. But while prefab homes are not always a bargain, your building budget is less likely to balloon. Because the product and the process are standardized, and the relatively short project life engenders inertia, the client is protected from the nasty pecuniary jack-in-the-boxes that plague so much residential construction. And in the case of the Glidehouse, Andrew Reid believes you pay for top quality. “For what we paid, I would take this any day. It’s built stronger. There’s more material in this home, more framing. And it’s beautiful.”
When you buy a Glidehouse, you’re also shelling out for a nouveau lifestyle embracing sustainable design, green materials and a healthy living environment, all wrapped up in a design aesthetic that celebrates simplicity. It’s a product skillfully in tune with a generation determined to live mindfully. Kindra explains, “A second home can feel wasteful. It assuages my guilt a little that this house sits, as Michelle Kaufmann would say, very lightly on the land.” In the end, though, the Glidehouse is a good buy because the design is top-notch. It’s an example of how prefab can really pay off—when it offers couture architecture at off-the-rack prices.
Although the Reids opted to rely on Lake Chelan’s ultra-affordable electricity, their Glidehouse came wired for alternative energy. In addition to efficient tankless boilers that produce hot water only when needed, the house can be hooked up to solar cells (the sloped roof is solar-ready), wind turbines, geothermal power, or a hybrid system. Eco-friendly bamboo flooring, resin countertops made from recycled paper and optional recycled glass tile fulfill a green material mandate. Air quality is protected both mechanically and passively. Filtration ducts triple-filter the house ventilation system, and on warm days, air entering through open sliding doors flows across the house and is pulled up and out of a row of clerestory windows on the opposite wall, creating a breezy natural air conditioning. Since sunshine, as well as fresh air, pours into the house from two sides, lights are seldom tripped until sundown, another energy saver.
Kaufmann knows that no matter how enlightened, the average young Americans still have a lot of stuff. She’s addressed our un-aesthetic materialism with sliding wood doors that line the back of each room, hiding ample storage space. No matter how messy your inner pantry, just glide the doors closed and everything’s zen again. The rest of the space planning is equally well engineered. The Reids’ home feels almost magically expansive. 1,600 square feet somehow encompasses three bedrooms, 2.5 baths and a great room, while each space still manages to telegraph thoughts like airy, open and calm.
As ideal as the Glidehouse is in many ways, it’s hard to imagine it in a suburb. It seems to me that a glass-walled house needs a view, preferably a scene with a bit of wildness. Kindra speaks with satisfaction of watching the seasons change lakeside. In winter, the trunks of the fruit trees disappear in the deep snow; in spring, pale pink apple blossoms blanket the valley. Throughout the summer, dry breezes play through the toast-colored hills, the Reids’ son, Jeremy, now 13, spends every waking moment in the pool, and the long hot days feel simple and beautifully lazy in a Tuscan sort of way. With vineyards springing up on every hillside, the Reids display their dedication to the local la dolce vita by pairing vintages from local vintners Chelan Estate Winery and Tsillan Cellars with home-cooked meals eaten with the Glidehouse doors flung wide open.
It’s these Arcadian summers that draw guests, lots of guests. With visitors stacked like kindling, the Reids began to explore options for expansion. They envisioned a “Glidehouse compound” with a breezeway connecting the original structure to a second Glidehouse set against the apple and walnut orchard up the hill. When Chelan county balked on supplying the necessary permits, the space-squeezed Reids made the regretful decision to put the Glidehouse on the market. In the meantime, they’re on the hunt for more land. “You’ll eventually find us in a custom contemporary in Chelan,” says Kindra. “Once you have the modern bug you don’t go back easily.”
For more information on the Lake Chelan Glidehouse for sale contact Lindsey Yowell with Snapp! Co., 509.860.2854; lindsey@snappco.com.
For more information on Michelle Kaufmann Designs visit mkd-arc.com.
