One of the great things about Blu is that we get to work with some wonderful home owners, who really love getting involved with building their home.  Pat Wheeler, who just watched her home delivered and set in Maine a few days ago, is one such client.  Read her blog to follow her story.  She’s also taken some beautiful pictures, which we have included below for your enjoyment.

March 15th visit to Blu’s Springfield, MA factory

Installing the clerestory windows.  House faces South for solar gain, and is built to be eco-friendly

Crane hoisting the insulated SIP roof panels into place

It’s not always easy to decipher what’s in those black and white floorplans that architects so often show to their clients. “What’s that circle thing in the closet?” “That’s your boiler.” “Why is there a boiler in the living room?” “No, that circle is a lamp.” “So circle means either boiler or lamp?” “Well yes… unless it’s a table.”

Fortunately for Blu customers, we supplement drawings with virtual 3D models to make our homes easy to understand, fun to personalize and predictably accurate. We do this because we love our clients, and to be honest, we don’t have another option! Due to the required precision of Blu’s folding steel frames, we design with CATIA, the most state-of-the-art 3D CAD software available. To give you an idea of how fancy schmantzy this program is, it’s also used to model aircraft carriers, cars, fighter jets and space shuttles!

Accuracy matters. A traditional design firm may provide a client with renderings. But you can count on the fact that these representations were generated from a conceptual model and may not match what is eventually built. In contrast, since all Blu Homes are already pre-engineered, a production model is used to output everything from manufacturing instructions to renderings and even furnished 3D homes that look ready to live in! All virtual products portrayed in our homes are created from their specification guides so you can have comfort in the knowledge that your fridge will fit in the cabinets, your doors will be the right size and your windows will come out of the factory exactly as they are positioned on your contract.

For most people, a home will be the largest purchase of their lives, that’s why Blu goes above and beyond to make sure clients have the resources they need to understand the space and all options associated with it. Our 3D models are personalized to show all the different material palettes we offer. It is one thing to see a bunch of material samples strewn across a table, it’s another to see how look adjacent to one another in a photorealistic virtual environment in which one can navigate. As you can see in the video below, comprehending the layout, circulation, scale and proportion becomes effortless when viewing a 3D model. Never before has it been so easy to imagine a lifestyle in something that does not yet exist!

Lizzie Rothwell, head of engineering at Blu Homes, today gives us a glimpse into the thinking behind Blu Homes, a series we’ll continue with posts from many members of our talented Blu Homes team. Lizzie today delves into something that is at the heart of Blu—the open, airy floor plan that makes living areas feel spacious and bright.

The open floor plan has long been a staple of American home design, but there aren’t many homebuilders for whom the concept is as fundamental to their practice as it is for us at Blu Homes. The idea of an open floor plan is to anchor the home around a large, open space that accommodates various functions – cooking, dining, living, entertaining – rather than carving up the core of the house into lots of separate spaces. Open plan designs have more natural light and ventilation than traditional designs, and they allow for smart, efficient use of space in smaller homes by using subtle architectural cues (a drop in ceiling height or a material transition) instead of space-gobbling walls to delineate one space from another.

So what are we doing at Blu that lets us deliver uniquely well on this modern classic? Traditional frame-built houses rely on interior walls to support gravity and lateral loads and there is less freedom to create open interiors. We’ve exchanged these load-bearing walls for a sturdy steel frame that frees us from these common constraints (and incidentally, provides our customers with the most durable residential structure that they are ever likely to encounter). Meanwhile, our unique folding technology (if you haven’t already seen it in action, check out the video below) introduces a whole new set of design constraints that actually reinforces the importance of the open plan in our designs instead of pushing back on it.

When you look at the plan of a Blu home, you may notice that the heavy, built-out elements of the design are mostly concentrated on one side of the house. When we ship a Blu home, this side is fully finished and ships as a module. In order to deliver a quality house to you with minimal on-site hassle, the “fold-out side” of our homes have a minimal number of walls or other installations. The challenge and the excitement for us as designers is to integrate these two sides of the home into a single, harmonious whole. In the end, every Blu home should have two cores – the plumbing and mechanical core on the fixed side of the house that lets us fit out these key portions of your home in a controlled manufacturing environment, and the large open space on the fold-out side that is the real center of the home.

Blu Evolution under construction

Blu Evolution in factory, wide view

Blu Elements and Origins in the factory

Blu home delivered to client site

Blu Element unfold begins

Preparing to unfold the side wall

The crew in action:

Teamwork through and through!