There are multiple launch points for optimism in watching a tiny home take shape on the garage-size turntables at Azure Printed Homes in a northeastern Denver warehouse.
After the 3D printing robotic arms have applied their magic for about 24 hours, the result is a sturdy, solar-powered starter home or mountain cabin that is built for about 30% less money than a comparable tiny home. And 70% faster.
Oh, and somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 plastic bottles have been recycled into the walls.
Azure Printed Homes started in Los Angeles as an affordable, relatively quick alternative to California’s notorious and intractable problems of rising home prices, NIMBY protests against low-income housing, and home losses from natural disasters.
Azure’s founders hoped the same dilemmas awaited entrepreneurial treatment in Colorado, and tapped former state affordable housing finance official Jack Tiebout to open a Montbello construction warehouse.
“To build housing faster, more efficiently, more affordably. That’s the goal,” Tiebout said, giving a tour of the manufacturing operation Monday.
Three plastic-extruding arms, like giant glue guns, heat up recycled plastic and fiberglass pellets and squeeze a continuous layer onto the wall pattern controlled by movements of the floor turntable. Once loaded and launched by the design software, the home printers can run overnight, unattended, and finish a shell between 24 and 40 hours later.
Work crews then run electrical wires and plumbing through preprinted holes and conduit, insulation flows into the space between the plastic layers, and carpenters frame out a ceiling, interior walls and the outer design, all inside the warehouse.
Azure’s base product is a tiny home that can stay on transport wheels or be anchored to a foundation, nine feet wide by 20 feet long. There’s a separate bathroom at one end, then a main studio room with a small kitchen. There’s room for a small dining table or chairs, which are then cleared away at night for a Murphy bed. An upgrade is available to a solar panel that powers electrical needs and a storage battery for off-grid living.
The tiny home unit retails at about $70,000, Tiebout said. Connecting a second unit that holds two bedrooms runs about $110,000.
Azure has an obvious Colorado market as an RV, a remote cabin, or in a collection as a tiny home campground or village. The company is in negotiations with campground operators or resorts looking to buy multiple units.
What Tiebout and the founders hope is that Azure also offers one small piece of a solution to Colorado’s affordability crisis, in a market tens of thousands of homes short of historic supply and stagnant from persistently high interest rates. Azure’s units can serve as backyard accessory dwelling units or ADUs such as carriage houses or cottages, after state legislation eased the way for ADUs across Colorado.
Congress just passed similar affordability legislation nationally, now awaiting President Donal Trump’s signature, in a rare bipartisan effort to ease regulation and speed up homebuilding. Azure works with local governments and code regulators in hope that the company’s standard work can win automatic approval whenever possible.
Azure’s units are also designed to be easily grouped together as workforce housing, near a ski resort for example, or as transitional housing in social service programs. Azure can print wall panels that can be hung on simple steel framing to create three-story walkup apartment communities, Tiebout said.
“As our co-founders say, if you can build something to California standards, it can pretty much go anywhere,” Tiebout said.
San Luis Obispo is finishing up a 54-unit community of Azure-built homes meant to be transitional housing with supportive services.
As Gov. Jared Polis has found in his mixed success pushing eased homebuilding rules through the Colorado legislature, frustrations remain for housing entrepreneurs like Azure. As one example, Tiebout said, even notoriously difficult California allows a state-issued general contractor’s license for homebuilders there. In Colorado, by contrast, nearly every city or county requires a local general contractor’s license, and does not honor the licenses issued by other communities.
The state is supporting Azure in Colorado with a $3.9 million loan from the Affordable Housing Financing Fund, created by Proposition 123. Polis’ office said at the time of Azure’s Montbello grand opening in the spring that the warehouse could produce 352 units a year, using 50 workers.
Other homebuilders are trying various forms of 3D printing, including VeroTouch Construction out of Salida. Many of those on-site builders are using liquid concrete as their primary material, with far bigger homes than Azure is marketing, and for far higher cost. VeroTouch has built 1,100-square-foot models in Chaffee County, and says its starter homes will begin at about $500,000.
Vederra Modular in Aurora is another company making promising innovations in factory-built home modules that can be assembled, mixed around, stacked and grouped onsite, said Brian Dunbar, executive director of Colorado State University’s Institute for the Built Environment. Vederra is doing it with more traditional stick-built construction methods, not the giant 3D printing, Dunbar said.
There are examples of 3D home printing “working pretty well, although I think that technology still has a ways to go, so that it really could meet the vision of being a new, innovative, affordable way of design and construction,” Dunbar said. Claims of speed and efficiency depend on complex machines, specialized software and unique building materials all working perfectly and consistently, he noted.
“It’s not always as smooth as we would hope, and that’s why we’re saying there’s promise, yet in many cases there’s still a lot to be done to make it work as well as we envision,” he said.
Developers and buyers are more open to modular construction than in the past, Dunbar said, a view echoed by Azure managers.
“My job is a lot easier now that we actually have the factory open and we can show people the units,” Tiebout said. “I think at first it’s kind of hard to picture 3D-printed recycled plastic, until you actually touch and feel how substantial they are.”
Azure’s Denver plant manager Andy Chavez said finding and training subcontractors for printed homes is a startup’s challenge. The contractor for spray foam wall insulation, for example, said they couldn’t bid a price for the work until they’d come to Azure and found out how long the job would take.
But the benefits of modular building, Chavez added, are as clear as the swept concrete construction floor.
“We can build 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” he said. “Doesn’t matter if it snows, or if it rains, or if there’s hail.”