The Ausstellung Eigenheim & Garten ‘show village’ of prefabricated homes in Fellbach, near Stuttgart, Germany

Every day, in a small village outside Stuttgart, Germany, Beate Höttgen welcomes strangers into her house. She offers them coffee and makes them feel at home. Her guests don’t seem to appreciate her kindness though. “They keep stealing things – cutlery, candles ... anything,” she complains as we sip espresso at her breakfast bar. Despite this, day in day out, she leaves her front door open and welcomes all those who care to drop by.

Höttgen encourages her visitors to wander freely around the spacious, modern home where she has spent most of the past nine years. They go upstairs to the bedrooms and the bathroom (with its sauna) and downstairs to the cellar. She is extremely house-proud, though, and insists her guests wear protective plastic slip-on covers over their shoes, so as not to dirty the wooden floors. Upstairs in the master bedroom there is a sign asking them not to lie on the bed. Höttgen herself has never lain on it in all these years. She does not have some strange obsessive-compulsive disorder; rather, she is a saleswoman in a show-home, as are her neighbours and her neighbours’ neighbours. Each of the 60 houses in this “village” is a prefabricated structure. They are model residences – platonic ideals, full of light and space, neat and perfect.

The village is owned by Ausstellung Eigenheim & Garten, a marketing company that provides outdoor space and a basic infrastructure of roads, parks and gardens so that various manufacturers can display prefabricated homes, assembled and, apparently, lived-in. Its sales centres, which have an admission fee of €3, not only display model homes – each complete with its own welcoming host, books on the bookshelves, flowers in the vases, music on the stereos and a coffee machine ready to whizz into action – they also display a model way of life. “Sometimes we organise free events such as a pumpkin festival, with free apple juice and different pumpkin dishes, games and competitions,” says Nina Eschenbacher, marketing officer. “We make it into a family day out.” There are restaurants, tree-lined roads, gardens, pavements and even toy train rides but nothing as imperfect as overnight residents in these villages.

Ausstellung Eigenheim & Garten (which roughly translates as “My home and garden”), was started by the late Ottmar Strebel, a home-loving publisher whose magazines, still churning off the presses today, focus on matters domestic and horticultural. In 1971 the Stuttgart village was the first to open in Europe (“and, as far as we know, the world”, says chief executive Andreas Speer). The concept has since been copied and other companies run similar show villages across Germany and Austria.

Initially, 35 companies displayed their prefabs at the Stuttgart site. Today, 63 companies from Germany, Scandinavia and Italy display 250 model houses in four sites across Germany, plus one in Switzerland. “We did once consider opening a show village in the UK but decided against it,” says Speer. “The housing market in the UK is very different from in Germany. In the UK, companies buy up land and build all the houses on it. In Germany, we have more of a free market and individuals buy the land and build to their own design.” Prospective buyers come from across Germany – and the world – to look at completed houses before signing contracts. “Of course, nowadays, people use the internet to look at different designs but as they’re spending hundreds of thousands of euros they often like to come and have a look at a completed house.” One recent trend has been an increase in visitors from China. (Höttgen showed me a photograph of an enormous German prefab house being built between the skyscrapers of Beijing.)

Dining area in a Kitzlinger Haus building

If you ignore the hefty carbon emissions that result from transporting materials across the world, these prefab houses are mostly very energy efficient – meeting strict German (and all European) building codes. Constructing off-site means it is easier to make walls that are air-tight and well-insulated. Display homes often have a cut-through section of wall showing the insulation – wood shavings or rockwool, say – that comes as standard. One company, Baufritz, specialises in all-natural materials, including organic paints and adhesives. As well as environmentally benign materials and relatively low energy usage, prefab construction can be more eco-friendly than building on site, says Speer. “It’s all very exact: there’s no mess or waste, meaning less landfill.”

It is also much quicker. Of course, these high-spec homes are not delivered in a flat pack for you to assemble yourself, following poorly translated instructions. A professional team of builders, certified by the manufacturer, arrives along with the materials. “A prefab house exterior can be completed in one to three days,” says Speer. “In four weeks you can live in it – but that would be extreme. Usually the time-frame is more like three to four months.”

But, unlike wartime Nissen huts, modern prefabricated dwellings are mostly chosen on cost and environmental credentials rather than for the speed of their construction. They do still have an image problem, though. “People still associate them with mass-produced, ugly and emergency housing but, these days, ‘prefab’ doesn’t mean the same as ‘mass market’ – you just have prefabricated elements manufactured off-site,” says Speer. It is a design concept for which Germany is famed. “Modern prefab homes are all influenced by the Bauhaus movement and its innovation of the ‘fitted kitchen’. Overall, there is a trend towards smaller, more simple, more Bauhaus design.”

Living room in a home by Huf Haus

In the UK, the manufacturer most acclaimed for its modern prefabricated houses is, arguably, the German company Huf Haus. Its expensive, light-filled, post-and-beam homes have had widespread TV coverage. However, in Germany, it is another company, Kampa, that is best known. “Kampa had a wider range of houses to appeal to all budgets,” says Eschenbacher, “and then they went insolvent.” It is a sign of the times that in May this company, which even manufactured a thatched prefab house, overstretched itself. Its famous name has been saved, however, and the new Kampa company still maintains some of the original designs.

According to Eschenbacher, as well as brand name, it is the landscape and vernacular architecture that influence sales from each of the four show-villages. For instance, at the Munich village, close to the Austrian border, it is the alpine-style houses, with lots of wood, balconies and pitched roofs, that are popular while at the Wuppertal village, closer to The Netherlands, the best-selling designs are stone-clad. The company has also noticed a change in the demographic of people interested in this option for building their own home. “A few years ago it was mostly young families with children but these days it is older couples whose children have left the nest,” says Speer.

The recession has had its impact. “People used to come and look round and sign a contract immediately,” says Höttgen. “I was selling 30 houses a year. Last year it was just six.” The number of people visiting the show villages each year is increasing but many have no intention of placing an order for a house, whatever the make or model. For many, it’s just a cheap day out. “Most come to look and be nosey,” says Eschenbacher. “There’s something fascinating about looking in homes. People come to get ideas about how to do their interior design and look at the furniture,” she says. “Others seem just to collect as many brochures and free things as possible,” she smiles. “We call such people Beutelratten – bag-rats – a marsupial rat,” and so, taking a brochure and finishing my coffee, I head on my way, past the cashier at the village’s entrance and out into the surrounding pumpkin fields.

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Other places to view and buy

Baufritz (www.baufritz.co.uk) is one of the oldest and most eco-friendly manufacturers. It can build a 60-sq-metre, two-bedroom house for €90,000, excluding groundworks and foundations. Add 30 per cent for construction in the UK. It has completed various private homes in the UK and chef Gary Rhodes’ restaurant, Rhodes South, in Dorset, south-west England.

Huf Haus (www.huf-haus.com) homes start at about £450,000 for a 180-sq- metre property.

In the US there are temporary exhibitions where manufacturers display their prefabricated and modular homes, such as the International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas (January 19-22 2010, www.buildersshow.com)

Topsider (www.topsider.com) has two-bedroom homes ranging from 60 sq metres to 250 sq metres, which can be built from $60,000- $350,000. Pedestal foundations cost about 25 per cent more.

In the UK, the Building Research Establishment’s Innovation Park in Watford, north of London, has six prefabricated eco-homes on display, including the Kingspan Lighthouse, the UK’s first net-zero carbon home. The Innovation Park is aimed at the building industry but individuals can register to visit during public open-days (www.bre.co.uk ).

In Australia, Kit Homes, (www.kithomes.net.au) has a 100-sq-metre, two-bedroom house from A$41,000 (US$38,000), not including foundation. In all cases costs depend on local building codes, environmental requirements, transport, crane costs, client specifications and labour.