3-D printed houses are sprouting near Austin as demand for homes grows

October 27, 2021

A major home builder is teaming with a Texas startup to create a community of 100 3-D printed homes near Austin—gearing up for what would be by far the biggest development of this type of housing in the United States, The Wall Street Journal reports exclusively.

Lennar and construction-technology firm Icon are poised to start building next year at a site in the Austin metro area, the companies said. While Icon and others have built 3-D printed housing before, this effort will test the technology’s ability to churn out homes and generate buyer demand on a much larger scale.

“We’re sort of graduating from singles and dozens of homes to hundreds of homes,” said Jason Ballard, Icon’s co-founder and CEO.

If 3-D printing succeeds at this more ambitious level, it could offer a response to America’s chronic shortage of homes for sale, especially in the affordable price range. Mortgage-finance company Freddie Mac estimated that the national deficit of single-family homes stood at 3.8 million units at the end of 2020.

According to the Journal, supply-chain backlogs during the pandemic have pinched home construction, while labor shortages have hampered production for years.

“Skilled tradesmen are a dying breed,” said Eric Feder, president of LenX, Lennar’s venture-capital and innovation unit. “So there have to be alternative building solutions to help with this labor deficit.”

The vast majority of newly built single-family homes in the USA are constructed on-site—and are framed in wood using traditional construction methods.

Icon’s 3-D printed houses use concrete framing instead. Its 15.5-foot-tall printers can build the exterior and interior wall system for a 2,000-square-foot, one-story house in a week, Ballard said. The printer squeezes out concrete in layers, like toothpaste out of a tube. The machines can print curved walls, allowing for more creative house designs, he added.

Lennar will complete the houses using traditional construction methods. The week it takes Icon to print a wall system is about the same amount of time it takes to frame and drywall a home using traditional construction methods, but Lennar said it hopes it can speed up that process in the future. 3-D printed homes can also be built more cheaply, with fewer people on-site and less waste compared with typical newly built houses, Icon says.

Buyers shouldn’t necessarily count on a discount to the market’s going rate. Lennar hasn’t determined how the homes in the new community will be priced but they will be similar to other Lennar homes in the area, Mr. Feder said. The median home-sale price in the Austin metro area in September was $450,000, according to the Austin Board of Realtors.

Icon has already built ten two-bedroom homes in Tabasco, Mexico, and seven one-bedroom tiny homes in Austin. Earlier this year, Icon built four single-family homes in Austin with developer 3Strands. Icon has raised $266 million in funding since its 2017 founding. Lennar and home builder D.R. Horton are both investors.

Other firms also are rushing to print out homes. Mighty Buildings, a construction-technology company in Oakland, California, said it plans to start construction on 3-D printed homes for a 15-lot community in California’s Coachella Valley next year. Preliminary demand for the community has been so strong that Palari the developer, is planning to add more lots, said Palari CEO Basil Starr.

Patchogue, N.Y.-based SQ4D. is currently building a 3-D printed home on Long Island that it sold to a local family for $360,000, above the $299,999 list price, said Kristen Henry, the company’s chief technology officer.

“I think 2022 is going to be a year where we are going to see a renewed emphasis on innovation,” said Robert Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders. “Any productivity gain, any innovation, will help add that additional supply.”

Research contact: @WSJ

September 4, 2024

Sizzler is a bit of an anomaly: Despite having shrunk to a fraction of its former size and retreating primarily to the West Coast, it’s a brand that remains a ubiquitous cultural touchpoint—in movies and online, on South Park and Saturday Night Live. And even if you’ve never eaten at one, you probably know what it is.

This made it a dream client for Mike Perry, founder and chief creative officer of Tavern, which collaborated with the beloved yet beleaguered chain on a comprehensive brand refresh spanning from its website to its stores, reports Fast Company.

“This brand is weirdly working backwards—it exists within the mind, but not necessarily in the world or in the hand,” Perry says. “It’s the most fun to take the brand that has been beaten up for decades and restore it. It’s not fun to take the shiny one and push it a little further.”

Digging into Sizzler’s past

When it launched in 1958 in Culver City, California, Sizzler helped invent the casual dining chain restaurant. It had its ups and downs over the years, but for an eatery known as much for its endless salad bar (which accounts for 40% of its business) as its affordable steaks, a global pandemic was not a great development.

The chain filed for bankruptcy in September 2020 and has been building back since. Today there are 75 locations (down from 270 at Sizzler’s peak). Christopher Perkins—formerly of Anheuser-Busch InBev—joined in 2019, and is now president and CEO.

Perkins says the brand had lost its way, and he knew it needed more than just a new coat of paint. He aspired for Sizzler to become a brand not locked in the past, but rather one of Southern California’s regional landmarks, like In-N-Out Burger, or Wawa on the East Coast.

In addition to losing its way, Perkins discovered that Sizzler had also lost its history, quite literally—there was no robust archive of assets and other ephemera. So he began to do a bit of archaeology into the company’s past, at one point sending a marketing intern on missions to the brand’s storage facility to see what could be dug up.

Prior to launching Tavern, Perry had worked on the Budweiser account at Jones Knowles Ritchie, which is where he originally met Perkins. Once Tavern came on board the project, Perry and Perkins immersed themselves in all things Sizzler—from store walk-throughs to the corporate side of the business—and did a bit of brand excavation of their own, buying up everything they could find on eBay.

In the end, Tavern saw the solution to Perkins’s problem as a “modern heritage” approach.

“It’s the search for timelessness,” Perry says. “The real tension between modernity and heritage and finding that is taking the old and ultimately making it new—and making it new so that it can continue to work in the future …. If you’re always trying to balance that, that’s really where the good stuff starts to come out.”

A cast of characters

One archival find was a steak-shucking bull character rendered in a Hanna-Barbera-esque style, which they dubbed Ribby Ribeye.

“All great brands have characters,” Perry says. “[Ribby Ribeye] is exactly what embodies a famous Southern California brand from both the midcentury and today, and it seemed like a no-brainer to bring back.”

Tavern built out a supplementary cadre of characters representing the brand’s other best-known offerings—the cheese toast, the unlimited shrimp, a lobster tail; and Perry’s favorite, the Salad Barbarian, an amorphous blob on a plate representing all the goods available at the beloved bar.

For the brand’s fonts, Tavern again turned to the past. Perry says Sizzler had used cuts of Windsor and Caslon Black Swash from its beginning through the mid-’80s or so, and they felt very Southern Californian in design and aesthetic, so his team utilized Windsor EF-Extra, Emfatick NF (a take on Caslon Black Swash), and Block Berthold Heavy and Condensed. For a contemporary feel, all the elements are blended with modern messaging and photography.

Tavern was given a mandate not to mess with the logo, so the team only slightly messed with the logo. They essentially cleaned it up—ditching the black background and dialing it back to a single color; refining the type in minute ways, and flattening it out. They also slanted it at an angle to drive home the notion of the brand’s cattle-brand element.

The Sizzler glow-up

Of course, all of these aesthetic updates mirror larger—and perhaps more consequential—changes. Tavern also worked on the restaurant interiors, uniforms, the living “brand” of how workers talk and embody the restaurant (think Chick-fil-A and all those “my pleasures”), the plates, and more.

It’s safe to say that if you stepped inside any of the competition in the category—Outback, Chili’s, Applebee’s, etc.—in the absence of a logo, you’d probably have no definitive idea of where you were. They all tend to look more or less the same: dark environments, menus with food shot on dark backgrounds, which Perry says doesn’t exactly convey freshness or taste.

So, the team sought to separate Sizzler from the rest of the pack by resurrecting the brand’s ownable red color, aiming for a bright and friendly overall vibe. The new website is now live, and Perkins says the changes will be rolling out to physical restaurants in phases.

In many ways, the rebrand is an attempt to remind the world that Sizzler is an anomaly. It exists in a space between chain restaurant and steak house, not to mention past and present. As for the future, the team says the key to all that nostalgia not feeling dated is to maintain a constant understanding of what is culturally relevant today—and then looking to the brand’s heritage and seeing what resonates with it.

As always, time will tell. For now, Perry says, “[After working] on big brands, we get bored of the brand a lot faster than the consumer. And just frankly [with Sizzler] I’m not—and that’s what I think a successful rebrand is.”

Research contact: @FastCompany

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