Our planet is dying. As if that wasn’t bad enough, our cities are growing more crowded, traffic is horrible and the air is poisoned.
It’s time to pack up and leave for the middle of nowhere, though not exactly that far away.
All dramatic exaggerations aside, there’s a high demand for residences in the suburbs and, as of recent years, prefab homes. For instance, in ever-crowded China, a company called Nestron is making a a very tiny prefab home called Cube One. Cube One is made for just one person, can withstand natural disasters (allegedly) and is packed with technology, including its own AI. In short, it’s the perfect home to have shipped wherever you might want to live.
Photo: Whitaker Studio
London-based Whitaker Studio is working on a similar concept, though far more elaborate. The idea was inspired by the success of its 2017 creation called Joshua Tree, which used shipping containers for living units. Those, unlike the Anywhere House, were not easily transported but people who saw them assumed they were – and they wanted to know where they could buy them.
“We started receiving inquiries about whether the house could be reproduced en masse, or whether we had a design that could be purchased off the shelf,” Whitaker Studio explains.
In response to their demands, the architecture firm has created the Anywhere House, which remains just a concept as of the time of writing. Anywhere House draws its name from the fact that each of its units can be easily transported on the road, so you can plop it anywhere. Just imagine building a 2-level, 5-bedroom residence, a lakeside villa and a luxury hotel with the same prefab pieces.
Photo: Whitaker Studio
Anywhere House is a system based on separate, prefabricated living units that can then be hauled by a tractor trailer to your preferred destination – presumably somewhere outside the crowded city, where you can enjoy the beauty that nature has to offer.
There’s a unit for bedroom, a unit for the office, one for the bathroom and a separate one for the kitchen. You get the idea. Depending on your budget and how much time you’re willing to wait, Whitaker Studio can make you your very own one-of-a-kind house from off-the-shelf prefab units. It’s the IKEA of portable real estate.
Each unit has at least two openings allowing to connect to other units. If no other unit is attached, these openings can be sealed with a door or a window. Again, depending on time and money, a variety of playful iterations is possible, where no house is identical to another.
The designers don’t go into all the specifics of how one might ground these units or connect them to the grid or sewage system, focusing instead on the modularity and movability of such a house, along with the advantages of building them off-site. Building the units off-site and then moving them on the road to the chosen destination would allow placing them in areas where building permits wouldn’t be granted, like a park or on the shore of a lake.
Photo: Whitaker Studio
Whitaker Studio says they’re building the first Anywhere House by a lake in Canada. They already have two “different bedroom units, a living room unit, a kitchen unit, a bathroom unit and a study unit” ready, with more to come – presumably for this Canadian residence. The goal was to transport the units and build the house in the spring of 2019, but no update has been offered since.
Until this first house is put together, there’s no way of telling how such a unique and quite beautiful concept would pan out in real life. At worst, Anywhere House can serve to prove that not everything that’s prefabricated lacks elegance or personality.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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