It may seem like a contradiction in terms to think of a modular home and a custom-designed home as one and the same, but with the creative and efficient building techniques developed by the current crop of upscale modular home builders, it's easy to construct a unique home off-site, ship it, and assemble it on the homeowner's land.

Typically, an architectural engineer will sit down with a prospective home buyer and discuss design ideas based on a combination of the customer's housing needs and the parameters set down by the home builder. Homeowners can choose from a shopping list of features to be integrated into one of a variety of available designs, Once the details are settled on, the home is constructed in sections and then moved to the home site.

One home design and building firm, Bensonwood Homes, combines traditional post-and-beam construction with a unique Open-Build technique. This technique deals with a building as an organized group of systems to be isolated and treated as separate structural elements. The building site, structural envelope of the building, the division of interior space, the electrical wiring, plumbing, heating and cooling fixtures, and the cabinets, furniture and other accessories all can be combined in a specific order in a highly efficient building process.

The result is a high-quality, rugged timberframe home, designed and constructed for many decades of use, created with the kind of speed that only modular building processes can produce-the perfect combination of old and new building techniques.