Architectural recipe for a modular wooden house

Recipe for a modular wooden house

Catalog projects make up a significant part of family housing production in the Czech Republic. This construction method brings many advantages, especially in the form of lower prices, shorter deadlines and less complexity for production. However, these indisputable advantages often arise at the expense of architectural quality, which generally requires more financial resources as well as time and psychological investment of the people involved. Type houses use limited but versatile solutions and a multiplication effect to lower the price without sacrificing the architectural quality – each house is a tailor-made original and at the same time an unpredictable prototype. This presents a fundamental question for new house owners: taking a more expensive and time consuming, but well-made home in the form of cooperating with an architect, or compromise in function, aesthetics and price in the form of a catalog house? Is there a solution somewhere in the middle? Perchance.

Finding this way was our primary motivation to start Cake Houses and the first thing we did was ask ourselves a question: how do you combine the virtues of architecture with the practicalities of a universal house?

We think that every house doesn't have to be a distinctive original, because human housing requirements are often very similar and universal. Too much originality can be detrimental – clumsy individualism often leads to chaotic and nonsensical clusters of omnipresent urban sprawl. Diversity kept within certain limits is still necessary so urban and rural structures don't become stereotypical and boring. Using modern technology, we want to combine your personal preferences and the architectural principles with the universal qualities of the type house production. We present a unique project which brings the desired diversity of individual houses and larger developments into an ideal balance.