Prefabrication experiments - 509 - Loft-Liner, the split-level mobile home

 

The mobile home has come up regularly in this blog, and while it’s certainly not a model of building industrialization most pursue today, we have tried to objectively portray its successes as well as its failures, and sometimes even its follies. Mobile homes have a somewhat complex relationship with prefabrication, as they are often blamed for a generalized lack of uptake. In the manufactured home sector, negative connotations led to evolving vocabulary to relinquish links to assembly-line lightweight timber boxes produced at a time when regulatory frameworks were nascent and normalization not sufficiently developed.

 

The history of mobile home construction is filled with all manner of peculiar ideas to bring affordable dwellings to the masses. Elmer Frey of Milwaukee's Marshfield Homes, a well-known pioneer in the industry, even stacked mobile homes to showcase their evolving potentials (see blog no. 211). Frey is also credited with advocating for reform in transport bylaws and permitting for wider models. Rather than stacking or making wider models, another mobile home forerunner chose to integrate a second floor to increase flexibility of these houses on wheels. Founder and model designer, Myron Poole of the Holan Engineering Company explored 2-storey split-level-inspired designs and applied for the Loft-Liner trademark in 1954.

 

Holan Engineering Co and then its subsequent subsidiary Ventoura Homes marketed these trailers as packing the same amount of livable space and amenities as was possible in a much longer and difficult to tow 50-foot mobile homes. With a standard single-wide width the Loft-Liner evoked affordable suburban living and was sold in three lengths: 38, 40 and 46 feet, each with options for one bedroom on the first floor and a second on the upper floor adjacent to extra storage space. The company sold thousands of Loft-liners with an upper level which would prove difficult to tug around with today's height restrictions, but the 1950s allowed these behemoths to travel freely to mobile home parks and displaced according to a family’s needs and economic conditions.

Loft-Liner advertisement