Clicked together: Can Australia learn from Sweden’s flat-pack homes?

Most Australians would have had some experience with flat-pack furniture. It’s affordable, readily available and can transform a room in a day – no need to wait weeks or months.

But what about applying this concept to building an entire home?

Well, in the country that brought us IKEA – Sweden – they are doing just that. Sweden’s prefab and modular building industry is now decades old, and the majority of houses and many apartments there are built using prefab technology.

SBS journalist Abbie O’Brien travelled to Sweden to find out how the prefabricated building industry was boosting the country’s housing supply – particularly for affordable homes – for an episode of Dateline, airing tomorrow.

Ms O’Brien found houses in Sweden can be built in less than a week and apartments in just a day – something that if done in Australia at scale – could go a long way to help our own housing woes.

Prefabrication and modular building have been in the spotlight in the past couple of weeks, after the federal government’s budget commitment to invest $54 million into the industry if it wins the upcoming election. It’s part of the government’s bid to build 1.2 million homes by 2029.

SBS reporter Abbie O’Brien in a prefab home in Sweden. Picture: SBS

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Australia’s peak body for off-site construction, PrefabAUS, estimates less than 10% of Australian homes are built using prefab or “Smart Building” techniques, compared with about 90% of houses and 20% of apartments in Sweden.

Professor Mathew Aitchison – the chief executive of industry-led research initiative Building 4.0 – also features in the Dateline episode and told realestate.com.au there was a lot Australia could learn from Sweden’s prefab industry.

However, he said there were also unique conditions here which needed to be considered.  

“Buildings have to be very different to respond to different climate zones,” Professor Aitchison said. “In Australia, there’s four major climate zones which our buildings need to accommodate. So that means you can’t have a same building in Cairns as you can in Melbourne.”

Sweden also has a strong manufacturing history, he said, making it much easier for the prefab industry to become a staple of home-building there.

“So that’s one of the reasons why, in the work that we do in my group and some of our big projects, we’re taking a slightly different approach – it’s not the same approach that you’ll see in these Swedish factories – to try to solve some of the local problems we have.”

Prefab homes being built. Picture: SBS

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And then there’s the battle against the Aussie misconception that modular and prefab homes mean low-quality buildings.

Professor Aitchison said many Australians think of the old, school demountable building or a mining donga when they hear the term “prefab”.

“There is no correlation, I think, between good design and whether it’s made using prefabricated technologies or traditional technologies. You can have great design and really high-end houses using prefabrication, or you can also have very low-quality traditionally built housing.”

It’s something that struck Ms O’Brien when she visited a prefab home – as well as an off-site building factory and a finished pre-fab apartment – in Sweden.

“I think there is a perception here in Australia that prefab homes are unoriginal, almost carbon-copy builds,” Ms O’Brien told realestate.com.au. “But the house on the outskirts of Stockholm that I visited wasn’t any of those things. The owners, Rickard and Matthias, wanted a custom-made home and that’s what they got.

“They had a vision and the company that they worked with helped that come to life, and when I asked them what they thought of the finished product they both said it was better than expected.”

Prefab apartments in Stockholm, Sweden. Picture: SBS

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She said when she went to a factory where apartments were manufactured, she was unsure how the finished product would look and feel – but that all changed when she actually saw a completed home.

“It felt almost like a display home or a show home [in the factory], but later that evening I was given the chance to go and visit a three-bedroom apartment that was being lived in by a couple and it was built in the same factory that I had been to that day,” she said. “I was surprised by how homely it felt. It was maybe two or three sections, or so-called ‘modules’, that when they reassembled, they were sort of clicked together like Lego pieces.

“I couldn’t really work out where one started and the other finished, so it did flow quite seamlessly in terms of quality.”

Are you interested in more prefab building news? Check out our dedicated New Homes section.

Professor Aitchison said it was important to think of prefab building as a “spectrum” – it’s not just finished buildings being craned onto a block.

“It incorporates all kinds of things like design and development and the planning phases, but also building operation. And part of that phase is really around, how do we produce buildings more efficiently, more effectively?” he said.

“There’s quite a variety of the ways that Swedish housing companies deliver their buildings. Not all of them are done in what’s called volumetric modular, where a whole complete module of the building arrives. Some of them use flat packed wall systems, a la IKEA. Some of them have a more componentised approach, where it’s a bit more granular still and some of them use a hybrid approach.”

A prefab bathroom at a factory in Sydney. Picture: SBS

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He said the Australian building industry has traditionally not been good at research and innovation, and though the government’s budget commitment was welcomed by the prefab industry, he’d like to see the funding go toward systemic change.

“My group has been really strong in advocating the need for medium- and long-term structural change in the building space. This is obviously a great start, but to do that, we need to build a solid foundation under this industry, and I think we can do that through some of the advocacy work that we’ve been focused on – for example – generating a research and development corporation that would work specifically for the building industry in Australia,” Professor Aitchison said.

“And we’d also like to see it focused on the problems that we have about generating medium-density housing in middle-ring suburbs in Australia.”

Dateline airs 9.30pm on Tuesday, 8 April on SBS and SBS On Demand.