plastic houses a reality

From the WSJ Real Estate Archives

But Does Anyone Want
A Styrofoam House?
by Eileen Daspin
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
From The Wall Street Journal Online

When it is finished, Jim De Zen's 24,000-square-foot home outside Toronto will boast all the conveniences of the modern mansion -- and then some.

The reception area, a 30-foot greenhouse to be planted with tropical fruit trees, will feature a waterfall and swimming pool. There will be an observatory, eight bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, a 2,500-square-foot gym and a garage the size of a mini-mall. There will also be a roof garden and a computer system that can set different temperatures for every room in the house and fill the tub.

Then there's the crowning touch: plastic walls. To be exact, polyvinyl-chloride panels that are slid together on site, then filled with concrete. The plastic "is easy to maintain, and I like it," says Mr. De Zen, the 29-year-old son of the founder of Royal Group Technologies Ltd., a Woodbridge, Ontario, company that has made plastic houses since 1996.

Mr. De Zen, who works with his father, says he decided to build the house because no one believed that plastic houses could be luxurious. "The house is a little extreme," he says, "but it'll be there forever."

With oil prices down, wood prices up and technology advancing, the plastic house has arrived. No longer just futuristic theme-park attractions or dated experiments in utilitarian living, synthetic houses are making inroads into the middle- and upper-tier residential market. Plastic houses appeal to developers because they are cheap and resistant to rot, beasts and children with crayons. Architects like them because they offer a testing ground for cool, high-tech materials, and because they could be the answer to a world-wide housing shortage.

And while the concept of plastic houses raises red flags in the environmental community, some architects say the new technologies could usher in the next residential revolution, or at least the advent of the plastic subdivision.

Certainly, plastic houses are a tiny part of the market, but prejudices against polymers are breaking down. Witness the plastic dresses on the runway of fashion design team Dolce & Gabbana and the popularity of plastic inflatable furniture. There is even a hip new New York restaurant, Harmony, designed almost completely in plastic.

As the trend ripples through the collective housing consciousness, where synthetic flooring, countertops, siding and window frames have existed for years, the functional and the hip are starting to intersect.

This spring, American Structural Composites Inc., Reno, Nev., will begin producing some of the country's first homegrown, high-end synthetic houses in decades -- using the same kind of fiberglass that formed the re-entry shield for Apollo spacecrafts. Interloop Architects, Houston, is waiting for patent approval for a house made of interlocking fiberglass and plastic modules. Eagle Homes, a division of Eagle Plastic Systems Inc., Pompano Beach, Fla., has signed a contract with the Brazilian government to build 3,000 middle-class homes, some of them as large as 2,500 square feet. And in Lake Oswego, Ore., a builder has developed a house that is almost 100% plastic and plans to have a subdivision up by this summer.

"The first round of plastics in the '60s was jumping the gun," says Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture and design for New York's Museum of Modern Art. "This new generation is more beautiful and refined."

Up until recently, New York commercial developer Robin Raybould couldn't have realized his dream home, a futuristic structure that looks like an iMac on steroids. The building, actually a 1,600-square-foot addition to Mr. Raybould's 200-year-old salt-box house in rural Connecticut, will have two bedrooms, a multilevel sitting area and two bathrooms. Designed by architects William MacDonald and Sulan Kolatan, its exterior will be a swooping Styrofoam and plasticized shell, and one bathroom will be made of a single piece of fiberglass, with the tub molded into it.

"It was difficult to do economically, but someone had to do it," says Mr. Raybould, who declined to say how much the project cost. Parts are expected to arrive this spring, tagged and numbered for assembly on site -- but the building has Mr. Raybould fretting in advance about the potential effect of low temperatures, heavy snow and ultraviolet rays. At least one insurance firm has assured the developer that coverage won't be a problem, but "I don't know if they know what's going to hit them," he says.

Strictly speaking, houses such as Mr. Raybould's aren't purely plastic. They are composites, with walls made from materials such as fiberglass and PVC. They also incorporate traditional materials such as glass, cement and wood trim. The Interloop Architects project, for example, uses modules with fiberglass exteriors, vacuum-molded plastic interiors and a system of locks based on the binder systems used on skis and snowboards.

To some, Royal Group Technologies' plastic homes and others currently on the market might look a little funny, and the faux stones tend to sound hollow when you rap on them. But from a design standpoint, many of the new houses are remarkably traditional in appearance. One of the first orders at American Structural Composites is for six ranch-style homes at a large golf-course development in Nevada. The houses will have acrylic stucco exteriors, fiberglass Mediterranean-style roof tiles, and a $130,000 to $180,000 price tag.

"There is no problem with termites," says developer Steve Baygents. "They are practically indestructible. You could take a sledgehammer to them, and you can't break them."

Whatever its advantages, plastic housing has had a fitful history. The first American plastic home was an exhibit at Disneyland's Tomorrowland in 1957. When a demolition crew tried to knock it down a decade later, the wrecking ball just bounced off the exterior walls; the house had to be dismantled piece by piece with saws and crowbars. There was the Formica House at the New York World's Fair in 1964. In the late 1960s, a Finnish architect came out with houses that looked like flying saucers. But none of the projects ever made it commercially.

That is partly because of plastic's erstwhile image issue. Although it began as a luxury material -- Cole Porter set the tone in "You're the Top" with the line, "You're cellophane" -- plastic soon came to be associated with things fake, tacky and even hazardous for the environment and health. Hippies coined the term "plastic people" to denigrate the establishment. "The attitude became, `If you can't afford the real thing, get plastic,'" says Grace Jeffers, a decorative-art historian who specializes in plastic.

Even now, plastics that merely imitate wood and stone are still snubbed by many residential architects. Corian, for example, an acrylic composite from DuPont Co., until recently was typically made to resemble marble. That "looked really cheesy," says New York architect Rachael Gray. But since DuPont introduced a new high-tech color palate, she's become a convert.

Ms. Gray's new 4,000-square-foot loft in New York, for example, will feature a 100-feet-long, kiwi-green Corian wall that will cost close to $36,000. There will be two tangerine Corian tables that will slide on tracks from an outdoor patio into the dining area and a huge bathroom finished entirely in white Corian. "You can take a mop and mop your walls," Ms. Gray says.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the new plastic homes. Environmentalists are particularly concerned about PVC, the plastic being used by Royal Group Technologies in its homes. According to Charlie Cray, toxic campaigner for Greenpeace in Chicago, PVC emits dioxin when it burns. "It's very toxic," he says.

Gwain Cornish, a senior vice president and chemist at Royal Group Technologies, counters that the amount of dioxin emitted by burning PVC is negligible. "Even mashed potatoes give off more toxins than PVC," he says, adding that PVC is less likely to burn than wood.

Still, the long-term economics of plastics make them hard to resist, if not inevitable. Skip Zink, a real-estate broker in Reno, is about to start building a 2,200-square-foot American Structural Composites plastic house on spec. Because it will only take a few weeks to erect, Mr. Zink expects to save "thousands and thousands of dollars" on labor and construction loans. As a result, the broker will be able to put the house on the market for as low as $185,000, or nearly $90,000 less than a similar house with traditional components.

And then there are Leslie and Brian Bender of Guelph, Ontario. When their real-estate agent proposed three years ago that they buy a plastic house, the Benders just laughed. "We thought he was nuts," recalls Mrs. Bender. "We're not living in a Lego house." But after visiting a few Royal model homes, the couple decided to take the leap. They loved "how versatile it was," Mrs. Bender says. "I don't have to paint it, I don't have to change the windows, and we'll never have to replace the roof."

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