SteelMaster buildings are quickly becoming a popular structure to use for a house. However, the idea is not exactly new. The Weintraubs of Rhinebeck, NY built their SteelMaster home in 1998, but it was just recently featured in a NY Daily News article…
It's a steel: Eco-friendly Quonsest hut upstate brings the outside in
By Karen Angel
custom-steel-homeAfter Linda and Andy Weintraub laid out $110,000 for 11 acres in upstate Rhinebeck 13 years ago, they didn't have enough money left to build a house large enough to accommodate their lifestyle.
"It required a considerable amount of room," explains Andy, a consulting economist and retired Temple University professor. They had three children and wanted space to entertain groups. Plus, Andy adds, "I like having a workshop, and Linda wanted a studio."
Their solution for getting more space without paying a premium wasn't an obvious one: a modified Quonset hut, with straight walls instead of the rounded ones typical of the World War II-era metal shelter.
"We realized that steel construction was much less expensive than wood," says Andy, 72.
Saving money wasn't the only consideration.
"We had a very specific desire to create something that was adventuresome in terms of design, and we had made a commitment to seeing how ecologically responsible we could be," says Linda, 69, an independent art curator and former director of Bard College's museum. The couple's "long history of doing experimental projects" included adding a silo to a 1749 stone farmhouse to create more space and converting a barn into a home.
metal-home"With every one of our houses, people say, ‘You'll never leave,' but we find the design process so satisfying we look forward to the opportunity," Linda says.
Their 3,000-square-foot, two-story Quonset hut has just one bedroom but "sleeping nooks and crannies that make it possible to accommodate 20," Linda says – a necessity now that they have seven grandchildren. The open floor plan lets in plenty of light. A separate 1,500-square-foot
Quonset hut with a small loft houses a studio and a workshop and another serves as the garage.
The steel for the three buildings cost just $36,000, and the total for construction - including adding doors, windows and fixtures - was $250,000. The walls are insulated with polyurethane foam, and a geothermal heat pump provides both cooling and heating - keeping their total energy costs at $325 a month.
"When our house was complete, it cost about two-thirds of what you'd pay for a house of equivalent size," Andy says. "Suffice it to say, this is a very economical way of building. This is a very low-maintenance house. It's been up since 1998, and it has never needed a drop of paint on the outside. It will never need a new roof."
The overall effect is stunning - and surprisingly warm - from a row of begonias in big pots on a ledge outside to the light-suffused second floor, an open expanse with banks of tall windows that houses the living room and kitchen. The furnishings are an artful collection of 1950s modern (the dining room tabletop was once bowling-alley flooring), folk art, furniture made by Andy and organic materials, like a driftwood coffee table.
steel-building-interiorOutdoors, from the root and stick fences to the skinny moat surrounding the studio, fed by rainwater and a stream, the Weintraubs' handiwork is everywhere. Six acres of trimmed meadow stretch down to a stone amphitheater with 150 seats, where local arts groups stage music and theater productions several times a year. For more intimate gatherings, there are a couple of small firepits. Two lambs frolic in a pasture and a pig wallows nearby, blissfully ignorant that they will end up in the freezer in the fall. A circular garden - terraced to enhance fertility - yields about two dozen kinds of vegetables. "The land provides us with most of our food," Andy says.
Kindred experimental-design spirits, the Weintraubs met as teens when growing up in New Jersey. They moved from Coopersburg, Pa., to Rhinebeck in 1982 after Linda was appointed director of Bard's Edith C. Blum Art Institute in nearby Annandale-on-Hudson. Andy, a theater buff, founded the Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck.
Through their involvement in the arts, the couple developed deep ties to Rhinebeck, which hit the national radar screen last summer when Chelsea Clinton got married there. After living in town, they found a plot in Rhinebeck with a view of the Catskills and a park-like setting. While researching alternative construction methods, they found Quonset hut manufacturer SteelMaster.
Because Quonset huts have no beams or interior posts, they are an architectural blank canvas, a quality that appealed to the Weintraubs who use design as a creative outlet. Plus, SteelMaster uses recycled steel, upping the green quotient, and easing environmental concerns. The sheets of steel arrived stacked on a pallet, along with 15,000 bolts in buckets.
"I couldn't believe this was it!" Linda says. "But we got exactly the units we needed. There was no construction waste, which is a major part of landfill bulk."
In just four days, with a few friends, they erected the steel shell - roof and walls, held together by thousands of bolts. Andy did all the interior woodwork. The landscaping and decorating were a joint endeavor.
"Our esthetic goal was to marry steel with very organic materials," Linda says.
They harvested cedar trees growing on the property for deck and staircase railings, laid stone for the entryway floor and created a small fishpond in the foyer, all part of their effort "to bring the outdoors into the house," Linda says. Cedar branches sprout everywhere: as trimming for a master-bath wall, on the sides of their kitchen island, and in a homemade coat rack and bookcase.
The ceiling is a marvel of metal ribs sprayed with polyurethane and coated with a lightweight cement mixture, at once creating insulation and a surrealistic moonscape effect.
All in all, Andy says, they are so content with their Quonset hut experiment they would build this way again even if money weren't a consideration.
"We are so pleased with the fulfillment of our three-part dream: ecological, economic and esthetic, and a fourth in terms of serving our family and social needs," Linda says.
Now, she adds, when people say to the couple, "You'll never leave," they are probably right.
Putting the peddle to the metal prefab
Like Andy and Linda Weintraub, a growing number of Americans are turning to prefabricated metal houses to lower costs and create sustainable homes.
"Factory-produced housing is a much more practical way to achieve the types of environmentally efficient and sustainable designs that are pressingly needed in a period of limited energy resources and climate change," says Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of MoMA's Architecture and Design Department who curated the 2008 exhibit "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," which showcased five prefabs.
Shipping containers are also becoming increasingly popular as homes. The Intermodal Steel Building Units and Container Homes Association (ISBU), founded in 2006, now has 15,000 members from all over the world. "About 100,000 containers for use as some type of ISBU are being sold annually in the U.S. alone," says managing director Barry Naef. "Their versatility, strength, recyclability and ease of transport are the main factors."
Architects are using them to create chic habitats.
New York-area architect Adam Kalkin is among those driving the metal momentum in the New York metropolitan area.
Kalkin provides a step-by-step guide to shipping-container architecture in his 2008 book, "Quik Build: Adam Kalkin's ABC of Container Architecture." It centers on his Quik House prototype - a two-story, 2,000-square-foot structure made of five shipping containers that starts at around $100,000 can be assembled in a day and was featured in the "Home Delivery" exhibit. He has just released a $99,000, three-story, three-container house called the 99K that the owner can build from a kit and a set of plans.
"I love metal," says Kalkin, who lives in an 1880s farmhouse encased in an airplane hangar in Bernardsville, New Jersey.
