Sustainably built, beautifully designed, attainably priced, and delivered in about 120 days: that’s the lofty goal for every HiFAB home. The company—a new venture of Oaxaca Interests, the firm behind West Dallas’ Sylvan|Thirty development—has partnered with the award-winning architects of San Antonio-based Lake|Flato to produce high-design, eco-friendly dwellings starting at $299,000. The key to completing their mission? The single-family modular homes will be prefabricated at a 7-acre manufacturing facility in Grand Prairie.
“Building houses in a factory setting gives you huge advantages in terms of being able to do things in a more sustainable manner,” says Ted Flato, HiFAB board member and founding partner of Lake|Flato. “It is the way to build buildings. There’s a whole lot less waste that happens in a factory environment because you’re building multiple projects. Also, transportation—the people who are working on these houses are traveling short distances and working in controlled environments.”
In addition to tackling environmental issues, HiFAB’s founder, Brent Jackson, hopes his product will eventually help alleviate the affordable housing crisis. “Being in a factory environment not only helps us cut down on waste of material, but it also helps us streamline to get to a scale to ultimately push down cost,” he says. “That’s the ultimate goal for us as a company. Our mission is to find a way to build a very pretty, simple product for a relatively low cost that can satisfy and be purchased by essential workers.”
Available exclusively in Texas and offered to both developers and individual buyers, HiFAB’s first product line, the Haciendas, is a concept Oaxaca Interests and Lake|Flato began testing a few years ago in a series of site-built modern homes in West Dallas. Like those houses, HiFAB’s Haciendas offer clean-lined stucco exteriors, simple metal roofs, and a focus on outdoor spaces such as porches and courtyards. Inside, vaulted ceilings, open-concept living and dining areas, and plentiful indoor-outdoor connections make the less-than-2,000-square-foot residences feel more spacious.
“By leveraging the outdoors, an interior room can feel a great deal larger,” Flato says. “So we’re able to build a house at a reasonable square footage that still feels quite expansive.”
Wellness was also a priority in the design of the Haciendas, which feature fresh air filtration systems, ultraviolet-light air purifiers, zero-VOC paints, and tile setting materials that are Greenguard Gold Certified.
The Haciendas come in two models: a two-bedroom, two-bathroom home that’s the less expensive of the two designs and a larger three-bedroom, two-bathroom home that starts at $399,000. Prices cover design, assembly, delivery, and setup, including the pouring of the foundation. “We include foundation in our price in part because we want it to be a turnkey solution,” Jackson says. “We want to minimize the amount of work a buyer is going to have to do. But we also do it because there is a high level of technicality that occurs when you’re crane-setting these homes. The mechanical, electrical, and plumbing need to be in an exact, precise space, and we have the wherewithal to do that.”
Each home’s modular components can be rearranged into three different layouts, and buyers can customize certain features, including paint colors, tiles, and other interior and exterior finishes. HiFAB also offers interactive technology that allows customers to watch the construction process online from start to finish.
While HiFAB’s homes can already check the boxes of sustainability, attractive design, and reduced building time (the clock starts on the 120-day promise once the buyer puts down a 50 percent deposit), Jackson acknowledges that when it comes to offering a big cost savings, the company still has a long way to go.
“We’re just not there yet. We’re not to scale,” he says. “But what we do offer—and for some people there is a cost associated with this—is a value proposition of time and reliability. You know what you’re going to get. You know when you’re going to get it. And those predictabilities are very important to our customer base.”
This story originally appeared in the July issue of D Magazine with the headline, “The Future is Prefab.” Write to [email protected].
Editor’s Note: After this story was published, a spokeswoman reported that HiFab increased prices to $274,000 and $384,000 for the two- and three-bedroom homes, respectively. And then, again, to $299,000 and 399,000.
