 The home of the future. It's been a dream for decades, but can we build one right here in Austin, Texas? The Virgin Curved have partnered to bring this dream of the home of the future to life. I'm Grant Imahara, and our goal is to construct a house that combines cutting-edge technology with innovative design. We want to see if some of the latest smart home systems and high-efficiency design can create a more secure and convenient environment and actually improve our daily living. How do we build this home of the future? Well, it all begins in a factory. In East Texas, construction company Evolution builds roughly 85% of its houses inside this 265,000 square foot warehouse. Each year, they complete about 50 homes. These fully constructed modular units can be finished in one-third of the time it takes to build a house on site. The power of prefabs or prefabricated homes is that they can be mass produced without compromising quality design and structural stability. The assembly line construction begins with pouring the concrete floor, and once the slabs have been laid down, cranes and hoists pick them up and take them to the line. But the scale of this assembly line is bigger than most. Instead of cars, it's houses. How long does it take from when a slab comes in to the finish line? We have 17 stations. If we were doing one box a day, you could have a complete box in anywhere from five to six days. Wow. The house is assembled as it rolls down the line on a track. The walls are installed on top, then wiring and plumbing. It goes from station to station, to sheet rock, the top is placed on, until there you have it, a complete unit. Technically, Luna House is a prefabricated home. For me at least, when I first heard about prefabricated homes, I had this idea that they're cheap or low quality. Where do you think that that comes from? I think a lot of it comes from certainly post World War II era, and the association as well with prefab, with modular housing, which we also associate with the mobile home. So you have that kind of connection in many people's minds, even in so far as a lot of prefab construction is actually quite high end. This is Michelle Addington, the Dean of the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. The opportunity to have much more precise control over manufacturing in particular is what enables the greater quality. And so by going factory built, you have an opportunity not only for higher quality control, but the opportunity to use much higher end materials because they can be protected in the factory in a way that they're not going to be as protected on a home building site. The downside is that you can't deviate from the design once you begin, so you better be sure this is what you want. Our Luna House has three bedrooms and is 60 feet long, and that's not changing. And because the factory is a giant assembly line, a problem with one house can delay all the other projects behind it. In fact, our original house was delayed so long that we needed to switch to a house further along the line. But even with delays like these, the total amount of time from blueprint approval to completion is around six months on average, whereas a typical onsite construction could have taken up to a year. Architects have actually been trying to accomplish some level of factory built housing for a hundred years. And so it's gained some traction and some popularity in the last decade with the increasing popularity of design. I think in a general level, that happens with Apple, it happens in the popular press. In everyday life. In everyday life. And so I think that that's kind of transmitted over to architecture as well. Architect Chris Kroeger is the founder of Maw Modular and is the designer of the house we're building. We're here at his home. Our business was founded with a primary goal of making modern, that kind of architecture, financially accessible. The design we're building is called the Luna House Floor Plan, made of three modular pieces. Modular design means these units can be configured in multiple arrangements. They can even be stacked to create multiple floors. You could think of them like big Lego blocks that an architect can use to create the best design for the needs of the homeowner. Our house is composed of three main pieces. One large module that includes one bedroom, kitchen and living room. And a smaller module that has two bedrooms connected by a bathroom. And a third module for the entryway that acts as a connection for the other two. We're working with a framework that I think is amenable to open floor plans, lots of windows. And so I think it is very modern friendly. You also get to choose all of your fixtures and finishes, flooring. There's definitely adequate room for customization with the finish in the house. I gotta say, I knew that it was modular construction, but it really didn't feel like it. That is our goal with the design for it, to feel not just like not a modular house, but to feel like an architect designed house. If you were to drive on this block, you'd say, oh, I think an architect designed that. So it automatically ups its cache. But there's still a lot of hurdles before you can really think of this kind of construction as being the future of home building. When you deal with something that's pre-manufactured, there's a tremendous amount of upfront costs in setting up that type of manufacturing, particularly if you want to get the economies of scale of building large. If we think about single-family homes, there is very little upfront investment. You can basically build in real time in terms of procurement of materials. So the costs are incremental from that standpoint. While we wait to see what the future will hold for factory-built homes, our home has already been placed on the ground. Right now, though, it's still just a shell. Over the next few months, we'll work to finish off everything inside of the home, create our own power generation and storage, and fill it with the latest connected technology for comfort and convenience. It'll be hard work, but in the end, we'll get a glimpse into what it means to actually live inside the home of the future. Thank you so much for watching. Now, I'm sitting here in our home of the future, but I'm curious to know what you think you need in your home of the future. Let us know in the comments below, and we'll see you next week with a new episode.