Co-founder of Den Outdoors, Mike Romanowicz, sees the convergence of a few trends that are helping spark interest in prefab cabins: the desire for more unique, wellness-oriented experiences, and the population shift in urban centers as people seek homes outside of cities and a restorative escape. 

When Meg Crosby purchased 13 acres in Phoenicia last winter, before the start of the pandemic, the Manhattan-based tech recruiter already had a vision for the weekend home she wanted on the land — and it did not involve an architect or a building a home from scratch.

“Just the thought of engaging an architect … A: there's a cost factor for me, but B — which is equally important I think — time is a factor.”

Instead she researched companies that specialized in prefabricated homes, which provide contractors or DIY-ers some pre-built materials, like walls, along with construction plans that simplify the building process.

“[Prefab home] kits are attractive because you're basically utilizing the expertise of the company,” she said. “That just seems like a simpler, less stressful process. I get why people are interested in doing a custom build, but I just think that if there is something that already exists that agrees with my aesthetic, then it just seems a lot simpler to me.”

Ultimately she found a happy medium with a local company called Den, from which she purchased architectural plans for a small home that she plans to build on her property this year, as well as a prefab kit for a 115-square-foot glamping-style cabin that is now complete. For roughly $20,000, she received the cabin parts flat-packed and shipped to her property, where it was then assembled by a contractor for roughly $6,000 more.

Plumbing and electricity on the site will come later; for now a portable toilet and propane heat will do.

The decision, she said, came down to their customer service and their designs. “I like the aesthetics of the cabins, of all of the things they have on their site.”

Contrary to its name, a prefabricated home or backyard shed does not actually mean it’s entirely pre-built. And it has taken many forms over the years. Sears, Roebuck & Co. sold some of the first kit homes in early 1900s, which included pre-cut, numbered lumber that shaved off construction time in the days before handheld power tools.

Today the building trend has evolved into prefabricated structures that use either factory-made house parts, like siding and a roof, or modular sections that are shipped and assembled on site.

Still, the time-saving promise of prefab construction remains, as does the one-stop shopping process. And during the pandemic, these two factors became big selling points for those who wanted the ability to easily purchase a place to escape their home or work outside of it — particularly prefab units small enough to bypass some of the bureaucratic hurdles of construction. Many towns do not require a building permit for structures that are under a certain square footage, another efficiency of tiny prefab structures that are around 100 square feet.

She sheds became even more popular for use as backyard studios for workouts or work during the pandemic. Cabins also rose in popularity. Dezeen, a site that covers architecture and design, called prefab cabins one of the top 10 architecture trends of 2020. “Perhaps it was the seemingly endless isolation, but prefabricated cabins that can be packed off to remote locations for living out an off-grid fantasy were very popular,” they noted.

One of the manufacturers Dezeen singled out was Den, and the A-frame cabin kit it introduced last fall. The Rhinecliff-based company, founded by Mike Romanowicz and his wife, Lizzie Kardon last year, markets the kits, originally priced at $21,500, as being so simple one could build them in three days.

Though Den would not share its sales figures, Romanowicz named 10 states that the cabin kits have been shipped to since they were introduced in November of last year, from California to North Carolina.

The company also sells architectural plans for small modern homes, which Den commissions from licensed architects and engineers. Their one- and two-bedroom house plans, priced around $300, are designed for weekend getaways, on or off the grid. Their one-room cabin kit, which is fabricated locally, truly encourages its inhabitants to unplug.

“While one could use [our cabin] as an office space,” said Romanowicz, “it's not primarily intended for a productivity use case. It's meant to go as far out into the woods as you're willing to carry it, so that you could sleep there or meditate there.”

The price per square foot for Julie Wallach’s home office from Studio Shed wasn’t a significant savings from a custom build. But the materials were delivered in six weeks, it took just three days to build, and no building permit was needed. 

While some sought an escape during the pandemic, others simply needed office space.

Studio Shed co-founder and creative director Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski Nova, which has been making prefab accessory dwelling units and studios since 2008, says they experienced tremendous growth during the pandemic. “People needed a home office overnight,” he said.

Some of that demand can be measured in the typical timeframe between an inquiry and a purchase. Prior to the pandemic that window averaged 80-90 days. In June of last year, Nova said it shrunk to under 30 days.

“I think that trend is going to continue,” he said. “Maybe with not quite the same urgency, but … a lot of large tech companies are allowing their employees to work remotely, pretty much permanently. And so that is going to change the landscape and the need for something like a home office.”

In renovating her High Falls home, designer Julie Wallach knew that by taking out one small bedroom she would need to add space back to the property’s footprint. And since she and her husband were living and working from the house during the renovation, she chose Studio Shed to furnish a 140 square-foot home office.

“My husband always likes to have a separate workspace,” she said. “We both work from home, [and] it's almost impossible to spend every single minute together, especially when you work as much as we do, and so when we moved into this house I knew it was going to add value to the property and it would be a great structure.”

A Studio Shed in Accord, NY. The typical timeframe between inquiry and purchase of a Studio Shed product used to about 90 days, but it jumped as low as 30 days by June of last year. "People needed a home office overnight,” said Studio Shed co-founder and creative director Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski Nova. The timeline has gone back up to 60 days, but is still faster than the norm.

She used Studio Shed’s online tool to design the office the way she wanted it. “It’s just like playing a video game. You drag and drop all these items to it, and then it has a shopping cart.” The tally was a bit more than a Playstation, though: roughly $45,000 all in, or $321 per square foot, which is on par for a custom-built project. The cost of the structure was roughly $25,000, the labor added $15,000, which included a deck and electrical wiring, and the HVAC split system was another $5,000.

Where she found savings was the time it took to arrive, just six weeks, and the days it took to build: three.

Buying a prefab structure, however small, to sleep or work, does not come cheap. So when Jackie Brown and Amna Ali of the wedding and event venue Gather Greene in Coxsackie initially priced out the prefab Lushna cabins they admired online, they were surprised at how low the first quote was from the Slovenian-based company.

After pressing the firm for details on the cost of shipping and customs for the roughly 156 square-foot cabins, Lushna went a different route for this U.S. build, one of their first. The company selected a local builder for the project, prepared a contract, and in the fall of 2017 Gather Greene and the builder signed the agreement, specifying that the contractor would both build and deliver all the cabins.

As the project continued to pace behind schedule, Brown and Ali checked in on their status in the spring of 2018, and discovered eight half-finished cabins and not the 16 they had purchased. Ultimately they had to hire their own excavator to transport the unfinished cabins to their property, and hire a new contractor, Jeff Westcott, to finish them. He passed away unexpectedly after he completed the work, a sad ending to the women’s overall unpleasant experience.

“Lushna is supposed to be a prefab product, and nothing about that process was prefab,” said Ali.

Given Gather Greene’s negative experience, they have asked that their property be removed from the Lushna site as an example of a successful project. Lushna, meanwhile, maintains that they merely licensed their designs to a contractor who did not come through as promised.

“It is our design…that is why it is on our site,” said Lushna’s CEO, Peter Licen.

Meg Crosby knew she was at the mercy of her contractor's timetable when she hired a builder to construct the Den cabin kit, which can take as few as three days. “From a few months after I bought the property, I’ve known about the issue of contractor availability,” said Crosby. 

Since the start of the pandemic, shipping delays combined with a housing and renovation boom has driven the price of building materials up. Lumber prices have risen by 240 percent in the last year, adding on as much as $24,000 to the typical new single-family home.

These price increases have trickled down to prefab construction, too. Den recently raised the price of their A-frame kit from $21,500 to $27,000, a 25 percent increase, to account for the lumber price spike. Studio Shed has raised prices on certain options and upgrades like wood siding, doors and windows, but so far doesn’t intend to raise overall retail prices.

Another pandemic-driven pain point of prefab construction is the inability to find a contractor given the demand for home renovations. Crosby’s cabin is ostensibly designed to be built over a long weekend. Hers took over a month, because her builder only had time to devote piecemeal time to the project between his other jobs, and she requested some customizations such as propane heat. But the delay hasn’t dampened her experience.

“From a few months after I bought the property, I’ve known about the issue of contractor availability,” said Crosby, who visited her finished cabin for the first time last weekend. “I knew I [was] working with the contractor’s schedule.”

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Nicole Davis lives in the lower Hudson Valley and has been working in local media since 2005. You can reach her at nicole.davis@hearst.com with tips, pitches and thoughts on where the next Kingston or Hudson will be.