"You can't blame people for wanting to see them in situ," adds pioneering Quinn who lived in Container House one for several months: "It offered a pleasant living and work space requiring the minimum of logs to maintain a comfortable temperature during the winter."

The zoning and building codes of your building site will have a big impact on your resale value. If the modular home is placed in or near a busy commercial area you will lose resale value. If you have your modular home placed in a quiet residential zone, its resale value will benefit. Also the land that you permanently place your modular home on is very important. If your building lot is in Manhattan, NY you will be much better off than if your modular home is placed in a swamp.

All building is dependant on planning permission, not generally required for garden rooms, but permission has so far been problematic for Aidan Quinn whose sales of his modular product Eco Hab have been caught in the planning process. "Most customers are in rural areas so planning takes longer but we hadn't anticipated it would take this long."

"You can't blame people for wanting to see them in situ," adds pioneering Quinn who lived in one for several months: "It offered a pleasant living and work space requiring the minimum of logs to maintain a comfortable temperature during the winter."

Burcht is a spacious two bedroom, two bathroom manufactured home offering 960 square feet of living area. The bedrooms are on opposite sides of the living room and kitchen, creating unique privacy for each room. The master bedroom is roomy and provides plenty of closet space with two walk-ins. The stylish bathroom has two sinks and a large tub for ease and relaxation. The second bedroom also offers a large amount of storage in its walk-in closet. The kitchen is graced by reliable Whirlpool appliances, is extra roomy with the attached dining area and has plenty of storage space in overhead cabinets and banks of drawers. Your safety is taken care of with smoke detectors in main living areas and bedrooms. Brushed nickel door knobs and hinges and chrome faucets also make this a stylish mobile home.

Although some modest modular homes are similar in appearance to double-wide mobile homes (manufactured houses), upscale modular homes can be customized in almost any architectural style and can be two or more stories high. Once built there's no easily visible difference between high quality modular and more traditional Modified Shipping Container Home constructed on-site .