FOR ARCHITECT and home builder Michelle Kaufmann, choosing to purchase a factory in the Tacoma suburb of Lakewood might not seem like an obvious decision; after all, her design firm ? and the office where all the marketing and sales for her award-winning home designs take place ? is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Still, Kaufmann seems to have a knack for figuring out what the market desires and meeting that need. So if the purchase of an existing 25,000-square-foot facility with 15 employees some 800 miles up Interstate 5 might look like a bit of a gamble to some, to Kaufmann it was a sure bet.

Then again, choosing to design ? and ultimately build ? prefabricated homes five years ago when her former boss, renowned architect Frank O. Gehry, had warned against it was a gamble, too. Remember, this was when the concept of factory-made homes still implied trailers and mobile homes. Even more upscale modular homes often sacrificed quality materials for quantity pricing.

Still, with traditional homes soaring in price, Kaufmann didn't need to hire a consultant to tell her the demand was there for elegant and environmentally friendly, yet affordable, homes. She simply looked at her own life.

In 2001, Kaufmann, a Princeton graduate and architect who had spent five years as an associate in Gehry's Los Angeles office, realized that she couldn't afford a home. Having moved, married and launched her own firm, Michelle Kaufmann Designs, in the Bay Area, Kaufmann spent half a year looking for a home to buy until she just couldn't stand it anymore.

"It was depressing," Kaufmann, now 38, admits with a laugh, "so very, very depressing." Every Sunday for six months she and her husband went to open houses. They looked at houses they could barely afford that would still need to be torn down or completely gutted. The only alternative was to move far from their offices.

"I kept thinking, 'I'm an architect! We're professionals, we earn a decent living. What have we done so wrong in our lives that we can't afford to buy a home?'"

Ultimately, Kaufmann bought a piece of land. She had to spend nearly three years going through the design, engineering, building permit and traditional construction process before she and her husband could move in. Later named the Glidehouse, it was a sleek, modestly sized 1,600-square-foot home. She designed into it as many "green building" techniques as she could come up with.

When friends and colleagues asked her to build an identical house for them, she began to wonder: "Could I do this same home, in quantity, in a factory?"

Gehry warned her that other manufacturers had failed, but Kaufmann was undeterred. When she managed to have her exact house duplicated in a factory setting, cutting her total build-out time by half and her costs by more than 20 percent, she knew she had hit on something good.

While working on the factory idea, Kaufmann also collaborated with Sunset Magazine on the Sunset Breezehouse, an environmentally conscious prefabricated home design. Constructed in a parking lot near the magazine's Menlo Park headquarters, it was toured by 25,000 people in the first two days it was open to the public.

The success of Kaufmann's Glidehouse design (a full-size replica of the Glidehouse was on display this summer at the National Building Museum's Green House exhibit in Washington, D.C.) and the extraordinary public response to the debut of the Sunset Breezehouse convinced Kaufmann that the time was right to create a new breed of home; factory-built for affordability and construction efficiency, but with environmentally sustainable components built into the house from day one.