News

Aug 12, 2023

Prefab Pads' tiny cabins built in Waukegan factory

Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain’s Chicago Business. He joined Crain’s in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991. The first two in a

Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain’s Chicago Business. He joined Crain’s in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991.

The first two in a new line of factory-built cabins are scheduled to roll out of a Waukegan factory this week on the backs of trucks that will deliver them to a half-acre site next to a cove in Connecticut, 900 miles away.

Harlon Dalton, the retired Yale University law professor and Episcopal priest who owns the site, said he’s eager to see the two small buildings installed on the site, which he bought to be near water and nature after his wife died.

“They’re very nature-forward,” each with two walls of glass that will frame views of the the cove, the trees, the birds “and the occasional coyote,” Dalton said. The expanses of glass will also make the interiors of the buildings “not feel constrained, but open,” he said.

Dalton’s two cabins are the first to be shipped by Prefab Pads, a startup run by Hemang Mehta of Lake Forest and his son-in-law, Peter Seltenright, who lives in Chicago. Their firm is the North American licensee of a Latvian brand of prefab getaways called My-Cabin.

With big windows and small footprints, they are, essentially, tiny houses built for a luxury-minded buyer.

“You want to be in your own cabin in the woods or on a lake,” says Mehta, who sold a family plastics manufacturing firm and is funding the startup himself. “But you want a nice place, a modern place with good design.”

With black exteriors of wood siding and a metal roof and blond-wood interiors with minimal details beyond bath and kitchen cabinets and the big windows on two walls, the buildings are a handsome modern version of rustic.

The overall look “creates an indoor-outdoor connection,” says Seltenright, who was in sales at an AI firm before launching Prefab Pads with his father-in-law. He compares the spare, modern style to Scandinavian design, something that’s “homey and comfortable, but not cluttered.”

The Prefab Pads product, an adaptation of the Latvian progenitor designed to meet codes in more than 90% of the United States and with more insulation than Europeans get by with, comes in three sizes. They run from 80 square feet to 350, with prices from $37,000 to $86,000. Mehta said a fourth model, 450 square feet, is in the works and will be priced at between $130,000 and $140,000.

Those prices do not include the cost of having a local contractor prepare the site, which Dalton said “has been growing more than I expected.” But even with that price rising, Daltion said having two small cabins delivered from the factory is “both cost-efficient and time-efficient” compared to having something built new on his half-acre. He had researched about 15 prefab builders before going with the Waukegan firm.

By “time-efficient,” he says, he means that Prefab Pads has done all the work of design “and can deliver something in my lifetime. I’m 75.”

They’re also meant to be energy-efficient, with a hefty layer of insulation, specialty doors that can tilt open like transom windows to capture cross-ventilation, and ceramic heating elements that work in part by holding the heat from circulating warm air to release in cooler parts of the day.

Mehta said the manufacturing capacity with a single shift of workers is 120 minicabins a year. Prefab Pads now employs five, not including Mehta and Seltenright.

The partners hope to adapt the design further to make building a lower-cost unit that could be used as an additional dwelling unit on a city or suburban site feasible, Mehta said.

On the factory floor, a Crain’s reporter walked through the two nearly finished units that Dalton ordered and a couple of others underway. Everything is put together in the factory, Mehta explained, including kitchen and bath cabinets, utility lines ready for plug-in on the site, and the windows. Only shower doors are not installed before the building is wrapped tightly in plastic and hoisted onto the back of a low-trailer truck.

The trip by truck is likely the harshest phase for the little buildings, said Phillip Brost, head of construction at Prefab Pads.

“If it can survive the beating it takes on the truck getting there, it’s going to be fine” sitting still on its site, Brost said.

Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain’s Chicago Business. He joined Crain’s in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991.

White, who signed a new $40 million contract with the team in June, is scheduled to close on the purchase Monday morning.

Much of the interior is close to its original state.

The conversion, a first of its kind in Chicago, was done in a layout known as a "Texas Doughnut."