UAE | Housing & Property
Home cheap home: new basic housing shelter to take world by storm
Dubai exhibition unveils a Dh23,850 four-room dwelling
- By Derek Baldwin, Senior Reporter
- Published: 00:00 April 8, 2010
- Image Credit: xpress /pankaj sharma
- Clint Morris with the Ecohouse on display at DIHAD
Dubai: A newly developed plastic-and-steel basic housing shelter is about to take the world by storm with a rock-bottom price tag of only $6,500 (Dh23,850), XPRESS has learnt.
American-based manufacturer Lifetime unveiled its new single-storey, four-room family dwelling at the Dubai International Humanitarian Aid and Development Conference and Exhibition (DIHAD), noting the easy-to-erect structure is expected to revolutionise housing for impoverished communities in emerging countries.
"This is our way to help in a humanitarian way," said Clint Morris, Vice-President of Sales. "We have an opportunity to bring new technology to the world. We want to make something that is long-lasting and that people want to live in."
Easy to handle
Each Ecohouse is about 377 square feet in size and comes with a front door, 12 shatter-proof polycarbonate windows, hard flooring and a roof, and can be shipped easily around the globe because the entire structure can be flat-packed in eight boxes on four pallets, says Morris.
Each box weighs 70kg so that the entire house can be unloaded by hand.
"It's essentially a house in a box," said Morris, who helped develop the concept design to the point where the first Ecohouse was erected in mid-2009 in Mexico
Unlike prefabricated homes made of wood and brick materials, the lighter, high-density polythene can be easily transported, even to the remotest regions.
Experts aren't needed to build the house, Morris said, adding that a small group of people can "put it up in three or four days".
The unit can also be among the first solid structures to be raised in a disaster area to be used as administrative, hospital or kitchen centres.
No excavation
The house can be installed on a concrete pad or a galvanised steel base and gravel, over which durable non-slip plastic flooring is placed at grade level, he said.
"With the Ecohouse, you don't have to excavate and there is no digging, you just put it up."
This week's introduction of the Ecohouse in the Middle East is part of a sweeping plan to bring the concept to the region where Morris believes the hardy structure will fare well in desert and tropical conditions.
- Length: 11.73 metres
- Width: 3.13 metres
- Square feet: 377
- Windows: 12 (polycarbonate)
- Skylights: 5
- Price: $6,500 (Dh23,850)
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