These foldable tiny homes start at $50,000 and can be assembled in less than 8 hours see inside
Kelsey Neubauer
- Hapi Homes uses prefabricated construction to build foldable homes for as little as $50,000.
- Two tiny home models are folded up at a factory, trucked to their final location, and unfolded.
New York real-estate company Hapi Homes uses a prefabricated construction process to build homes that range from 180 square feet to 1,600 square feet.
Customers can choose from 16 available floor plans — designed by outside engineers and architects — that Hapi Homes uses to guide the construction of the framing, panels, and flooring.
After those parts are built in a factory — which takes about 30 days — they are transported to the final location, where a builder can put the materials together in hours.
The company's 16 non-foldable models cost between $24,000 and $234,000.
The units can be as simple as a tiny home no bigger than a shed, or as grand as a two-story, full-sized home.
So far, the company has built and installed 12 units, with 12 more in production, cofounder and CEO Mohamed Ahmed told Insider. The company is in talks with developers and hoteliers, Ahmed added, and plans to build "a few hundred" this year.
Two of the units — called Glenflesk and Heuston — are foldable. They fold into themselves, which makes for easy transportation and delivery.
Both are 420 square feet. The Glenflesk model is a two-bedroom unit and the Heuston model is a one-bedroom unit.
Here's how the folding technology works.
After leaving the factory, the foldable home is trucked to its final location where a crane operator lifts it and places it on the ground.
The outer portions of the house fold inward on both sides of the center. Builders unfold the roof and floor first.
Then, they unfold the exterior walls. Afterwards they make sure everything is structurally secure, and put in the molding and other interior features. It takes about eight hours from start to finish.
When it's all unfolded, this is what one of the Glenflesk units looks like.
The exterior of the unit is designed for resistance, Ahmed told Insider.
The house is made of light-gauge steel framing — a material that is resistant to termites and other pests that can damage wood. The siding is aluminum corrugated panels, which is sprayed with anti-corrosion paint, while the doors and windows are aluminum alloy.
This is a floor plan of a two-bedroom unit. With every Hapi Homes unit, customers can choose to buy it unfurnished at the base price, or furnished for an additional cost.
An unfurnished unit comes with exterior walls, interior walls, a floor system, a ceiling, a roof system, most elements of the kitchen and bathroom, doors, plumbing, and electric.
A furnished unit comes with every lighting fixture, couch, table, and nightstand pictured in the next photos. It also comes with a stove, refrigerator, and dishwasher.
Inside, there is a furnished dining area with an induction stove, a table with four chairs, and artificial quartz countertops.
It opens into a living room with a long couch, television, and coffee table.
Hapi Homes sources furniture from a variety of furniture warehouses.
This is one of the bedrooms in the unit. The floors are made with wood plastic composite fiberboard.
All the furniture here is included in the fully furnished version.
The other foldable model is the one-bedroom Heuston, which is also 420 square feet.
The Heuston, unfurnished, costs $50,000. The furnished version of the Heuston costs between $60,000 and $75,000.
Here's a birds-eye view of the Heuston.
Without an extra bedroom, the living area appears larger in this unit.
Both the Heuston and the Glenflesk have bathrooms that include porcelain toilets, compressed wood cabinets, and stainless steel faucets.
Hapi Homes donated 10 of these foldable units to Odesa, Ukraine, which has been bombarded by Russian missile attacks as recently as June 14. Ahmed's hope is that these homes will help the city rebuild, he told Insider.
"If somebody turns around and says 'Okay, we want to use this as housing right now,' and then six months later, 'We don't need to house people anymore, we want to change it into a school or a classroom,' we can then remove the walls in the center and make the adjustments and turn that into a classroom," Ahmed said. "So these units are really multipurpose."
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