The new Vancouver special? Home built using prefabricated modules now occupied

Richard Chen and Angela So own a newly built Douglas Park home at 928 West 20th Ave. in Vancouver. Photo by Jason Payne /PNG

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Richard Chen and Angela So recently moved into their newly built home, which is two storeys and features a flat roof and a row of windows on the ground floor.

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It has an elegant, minimalist interior made entirely of Douglas fir plywood and is the first house in Vancouver to be built using a specific system of prefabricated modules.

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The modules fit inside a structure on a single lot near the city’s Douglas Park, and can be adapted, stacked and separated like containers in a Japanese “Bento” lunch box to create various options.

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The system, which is referred to as “Addapt” by its designers, is now being used in other projects, and the hope is that with more replication, it will become a way to build homes that provides more flexibility and less-expensive options.

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It comes as there are now provincial and federal standardized building designs, and most municipalities in the province allow three to six units of housing on what were once single-family properties.

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But there are still questions about how these homes are constructed and how to build more of them, as well as if it is possible to manage their costs.

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“I’ve been thinking long and hard about how to build a better Vancouver Special. That’s what we really set out to do,” said Michael Leckie of Leckie Studio Architecture And Design which created Addapt.

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Richard Chen and Angela So’s prefabricated home is ‘adaptable,’ meaning it can be reconfigured later, like a Bento box, as the family’s needs change. Photo by Jason Payne /PNG

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The Vancouver Special was a simple house design with roots in the mid-1960s that many working-class, immigrant families were able to buy cheaply and know they could build quickly in a month. The Vancouver Special typically had easily adaptable rooms and space for extended family members.

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“I think up until relatively recently, the term modular, prefabricated housing didn’t really have a good connotation,” said Chen.

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The cost of housing has risen so high that both Chen and So liked the minimalist esthetic of prefab cabin kits that Leckie was designing at his other firm, Backcountry Hut Company. These are used to build A-frame and other recreational homes in mostly large, rural locations.

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The couple wondered if they could knock-down the old Vancouver Special home on their city lot and replace it by using one of these prefab kits, then add a cabin the property.

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Of course, it could never be that simple.

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But the question started a years-long process, and Leckie asked Chen and So to build the prototype for a system his other firm was researching.

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The result is Addapt, which pulls together the manufacturing, packaging, shipping and assembling of sections of houses so they can be used in flexible ways for city homes that are both standardized and customizable.

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“Our house got built in two weeks. Basically, it’s like Lego,” said Chen, explaining that the modules were manufactured in a shop at Main and Terminal streets in east Vancouver and assembled on their property.

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A room inside Richard Chen and Angela So’s prefabricated home. Photo by Jason Payne /PNG

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The footprint of the home is 2,400 sq. ft and there are three 400-sq.-ft. modules that sit in a row and are stacked on top of one another, with a sitting room, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor and bedrooms and office space upstairs.