Dimensions X wants to be the Tesla of prefab houses

What if you could order your home online, choosing its size, the layout of the rooms, the type of fixtures, the placement of doors and windows, and even add a mineral pool just outside of your porch? Well, that’s precisely the goal of Dimensions X, a new Australian startup that aims at becoming the Tesla of prefabricated houses. The founder is Oscar Martin, already a co-founder of the Australian hit news site Pedestrian.Tv. Martin discovered by himself the pitfalls of building a house and wanted to find a way to simplify the process of buying a pre-designed and prefabricated home that would be both beautiful and environmentally friendly.

For the project, he partnered with Australian architect Peter Stitchbury, known for his works around sustainability. So far, they’ve been able to build a prototype called OM-1, a 57-square-meter elongated house constructed primarily out of cross-laminated timber and packed with energy-efficient solutions. 

The focus is now on simplifying the buying process by creating a seamless online experience. Martin is well aware that eliminating all the complexities of building a property is an impossible feat. The main goal he wants to achieve by creating a seamless buying process, though, is mostly eliminating all of the hidden costs that come with traditional construction.

While the idea is excellent, and the OM-1 prototype looks like a stunning design home, the gripe we still have with the project is that sustainability is only interpreted in the literal sense and applied to the physical nature of the item. This way, sustainability keeps being just a perk for wealthy entrepreneurs, who can afford both to invest large sums of money into a prefabricated house and to purchase the wide-open land (like all the pictures seem to suggest) where to place it and enjoy it in nature, embodying the optics of sustainability more than the concept itself.