Green your trailer park

Photo by girlgenius80

Apple’s Steve Jobs (here's to a speedy recovery!) must be darn proud of the branding name-game that iPods have spawned. Yesterday it was Kittypods. Today it’s i-Houses.

 

The world’s largest producer of manufactured/mobile homes, Clayton Homes, is generating considerable advance buzz over the i-House, a manufactured home with compelling green features; it's due to hit the market around May. Clayton — the Tennessee-based company has been around since 1934, the height of the Great Depression — was bought by Warren Buffet in 2003 and may (or may not) find considerable success with the i-House considering the dire state of the mortgage market and the economy in general. Individual i-Houses are rumored to sell in the ballpark of $100,000 via licensed Clayton dealers.

 

Before I go on to describe the impressive green specs of the i-House, it’s important to remember that, as TreeHugger’s architecture and design guru Lloyd Atler points out, the homes will not be made for urban or suburban lots. They will be made for mobile parks. Whether or not those who buy mobile homes, a traditionally blue collar bunch with relative disinterest in sustainability, will embrace these fancy green newbies on the block (or park, in this case) is yet to be seen.

The i-House gets its name from its blueprint (sorry, Steve). The main part of the home measures 992 square feet and contains the living room, kitchen, bedroom, and a bathroom. An additional “flex room” with a rooftop deck can be configured with the main portion of the home to resemble an “i” shape. The homes feature a butterfly roof with rainwater catchment system, an optional solar panel system (for an additional $8,000), dual-flush toilets, bamboo flooring, recycled content decking material, low E windows, and more.

Not sure if the mobile home lifestyle is up my alley, but Clayton has certainly wooed me. And there’s no doubt that I’d swap my frigid fourth-floor walk-up for a quaint little i-House in Malibu right about now. Do you think the mobile home world is ready to go green?