When a group of former Amazon Robotics executives launched their modular homebuilding business in 2022, they planned to work with developers to find quicker and more efficient ways to build houses.
But in January, as a firestorm tore through Los Angeles, destroying thousands of residences in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, the leadership at Reframe Systems decided to pivot.
“We haven’t built our business to sell to customers or even to retail users; we’ve been gearing our entire system to developers,” Vikas Enti, Reframe CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. “Now, there’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make sure we’re setting ourselves up for success with a new customer type.”
That new customer type? Altadenans looking to rebuild their homes efficiently and affordably.
Since early this year, Reframe Systems has been working with residents and nonprofit organizations in Altadena to devise a plan for delivering factory-made homes to California.
On Tuesday, Reframe Systems announced it was the recipient of the 2025 Ivory Prize for Construction and Design, a step toward bringing its vision to fruition. Ivory Innovations, a nonprofit at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business focused on housing affordability, awarded the $100,000 grant.
Enti said his team will use the funding to subsidize a prefabricated house for a resident, perhaps a local leader, in Altadena. The home will be crafted in the company’s Massachusetts microfactory and sent in sections to Altadena, where a team will piece it together.
They will ship two climate-resilient houses to Altadena this year
Enti said Reframe plans to ship at least two houses to Altadena this year, including the residence the Ivory Prize is subsidizing.
The team is working to finalize a contract with a customer for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow. That contract should be signed over the next month, according to Enti, and the team believes they’ll receive a permit within 30 days.
Production in the factory will begin in July. The home itself will be shipped in August, and it will be installed at the end of that month or in September, Enti said. That installation is expected to take one to two weeks, depending on weather and labor availability in California.
The second home, subsidized by the grant, will “follow pretty quickly,” Enti said, depending on how the team sequences the projects in their factory.
For now, Reframe is working with a local lobbying firm to identify “a local leader or a person of influence in the region.” That person will receive their home from Reframe with a discount equal to the $100,000 grant.
That home will not only serve as a climate-resilient residence for the recipient, but it’ll give Reframe a chance to “showcase how we’re able to build,” according to Enti.
Navigating the challenges of building in California
Delivering homes to California requires navigating specific guidelines for climate resilience and permitting. There are different codes, especially when it comes to building a home considered energy-efficient, Enti said. Though Reframe considers all its products efficient by default, the company is taking extra steps in the homes it's designing for California.
“Air tightness is a key factor here,” he explained. “We’ve been learning through these wildfires that the more airtight a home is, the higher its odds of surviving exposure to a wildfire.”
A home’s airtightness is measured by testing the amount of air that leaks out every hour. Many building codes require that value to be between 1 and 3.5 air changes per hour. More energy-efficient homes score below 1 on that scale. The most stringent energy-efficiency standards come from the International Passive House Association, which requires a score of 0.6 or lower.
“We achieved a number of 0.47,” Enti said, “so we exceeded that on the first draw.”
The more airtight a home is, the less likely burning embers can enter the house, according to The Passive House Network, a nonprofit. At the same time, an airtight home can prevent smoke damage and even make it easier for residents outside a burn zone to shelter in place and avoid drifting smoke.
“For California, we have to do a couple more things,” Enti added, “and this will become a more standard offering for us, especially for areas that are susceptible to wildfires.”
Those additional features include indoor and outdoor sprinkler systems, noncombustible facades and fire-resistant roofs.
Navigating the permitting process in California can be challenging, but Enti noted the executive orders local authorities have issued to speed up the process.
“At this point, we’re already making preemptive progress on all the design details that we need, so we can at least have our permits ready,” he said.
Manufactured housing can help with more than recovery
Even before this year’s fires, California was experiencing a housing shortage.
The Eaton Fire, one of January’s largest blazes, added to that deficit when it destroyed more than 5,500 single-family houses valued at roughly $7.8 billion, data from Homes.com showed. The brunt of that damage, about $7.5 billion worth, was in Altadena.
Now, nearly five months have passed, and yet, only 10 building permits have been issued in the Eaton area, according to Los Angeles County. In other words, only 10 people who have applied to rebuild have a permit to do so. Meanwhile, there are 488 applications for rebuild permits still awaiting county approval.
Enti says Reframe offers a solution: It can turn houses around faster and more affordably than other methods, especially because its factories are so small, optimizing the building process while minimizing the costs associated with production.
“We need about 40 to 45 people to build 500 homes a year out of these factories,” he said. “It’s a very, very efficient process.”
That, in turn, can deliver more affordable housing to consumers. In Los Angeles, two-bedroom, two-bathroom single-family houses on Homes.com are listed from about $500 per square foot to more than $3,000.
Enti said the homes Reframe is planning for Altadena will cost about $450 per square foot.
Some Altadenans agree that modular homes could be an efficient way to rebuild, according to Nic Arnzen, Altadena Town Council vice chair.
“We have a housing crisis, and it’s a good solution and it avoids the unaffordability,” he said in an interview.
More than that, Arnzen said he sees manufactured housing as “the thing that we look back half a century from now and say, ‘Oh, this is a reminder of that era, and this is actually a pretty cool design.’”
It’s not a new idea for Altadena, either. Before the fires, the community was home to a 1920s residential development made up of houses known as “Jane’s Cottages.” The homes followed four floor plans. Many still served as residences until this year, when some were lost in the Eaton fire, according to media reports.
“To ignore [manufactured housing] is ignoring what already existed,” Arnzen said. “If we’re talking about authenticity, we already had elements of that. We had matching houses from the 1920s that were a popular design and maybe at the time were looked at as cookie-cutter but have since been held up as models of our history.”
All told, Arnzen said he sees manufactured homes as an opportunity to revive Altadena, and he’s hopeful his neighbors will see that, too, or at least respect those who do.
“You’re just not going to please everyone. The beautiful thing about Altadena is that we are opinionated and we are passionate about our opinions, but we also listen to each other,” he said.