MOLI VIEW™

Designer Jennifer Siegal's own house is a modest 1920s Spanish bungalow on the leeward side of busy Lincoln Boulevard in Venice, California, that looks nothing like what she makes at her day job. A little bit homely, a little bit avant-garde, it's a place to try out ideas, test products, and show off to potential clients by giving them a feel for how she might make their own new house work. If they don't grok Siegal's crunchy-granola-meets-industrial vibe, then maybe they should just move on.
A few years ago, Siegal was the It girl of prefabricated residential architecture, after newspapers and magazines (including Dwell) touted her use of recycled transoceanic shipping containers as the Next Big Thing. But windowless, uninsulated metal crates aren't for everyone; they were more like the Honda Insight of the prefab world, conversation pieces that spurred ideas about how to make kit housing less expensive and more pragmatic. For Siegal, the answer, these days, is factory-built: After years of hard work and heartbreak, she's got her own prefab factory up and running in Chino, California, churning out custom houses and, lately, a school.

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