This article appears in print in the May 2018 issue. Click here to subscribe.

Imagine if it was as easy to buy a home as an iPhone. With Node, a Seattle-based company started last year with the goal of creating turnkey homes with the smallest possible footprint, that fantasy comes a little closer to reality.

Node prefab homes (starting at $90,000) are built in the Pacific Northwest entirely with nontoxic materials and are move-in ready in less time than it generally takes to order a piece of furniture. Customizable add-ons, such as solar panels and rainwater capture and filtration systems, can take owners off the power grid completely.

Cofounder Bec Chapin says these homes should last a lifetime, so structural adaptability—adding on another bedroom down the line, for example—is an important feature. The company completed two projects in Washington state in 2017 and hopes to add 10 more this year in urban and rural locations, including, possibly Santa Rosa, California, to help victims of last fall’s fire.

Like the latest tech, there are “just enough choices to make it your own,” Chapin says. Unlike the latest tech, these homes are built with long-term sustainability in mind: “What’s the opposite of planned obsolescence? That’s what we have.”

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