In response to industry challenges, Bob Worsley, a former Arizona Senator and entrepreneur, and Stephen James, a designer and architect, co-founded ZenniHome, a modular company focused on providing quality, attainable housing.
Founded in 2019 and based in Page, Arizona, ZenniHome produces factory-built models that can be easily transported to sites. The two model homes are similar to LEGO blocks and can be configured together in various applications, including stacked as many as five units high for multifamily projects. A ZenniHome comes fully furnished with beds, sofas, tables, chairs, appliances, and smart home feature upgrades, and sits on either six or nine concrete pier footings, depending on the model’s size.
ZenniHome has developed two unit models: the Citizen and Denizen. The 640-square-foot Citizen model, with prices starting at $125,000, has two bedrooms and has been designed for three to four people to live comfortably, according to the company. The 320-square-foot Denizen model is a studio home that allows one to two people to live. David Monson, vice president of marketing for ZenniHome, says the company’s use of Ori furniture in its design allows spaces to transform, creating the illusion of a larger living space. Beds can be retracted into the ceiling, allowing bedrooms to double as living rooms.
“Your bedroom—when it becomes a bedroom—is very luxurious, it feels like a nice hotel. When you put [the bed] up, you’ve got a family room, which also is a very comfortable space,” Monson says. “Our larger model feels like and operates more like a 1,200- to 1,500-square foot home. We’re not trying to stuff people in little, tiny mouse traps. We want this to be something that someone buys and says ‘I love living here.’”
The homes, assembled in ZenniHome’s factory, are built using steel frames in a secure, weather controlled manufacturing environment to the 2018 International Residential Code standard. Each ZenniHome consists of two halves that are the size of a standard shipping container for easy transport to and assembly at the homesite. The homes come standard with a 30 pounds per square foot snow load capacity and are built to exposure category C and seismic risk category DII for earthquakes and hurricanes. The exterior walls of the factory-built models have an R-35 rating, the floor and ceiling are rated R-29, and the windows have a U value of 0.35.
Monson says while many prefabricated companies offer the ability to build custom plans, ZenniHome plans to operate more similarly to a car manufacturer: rigidity in the two core base units, with customization options in exterior colors.
“Factories don’t like to have a lot of customization and new bells and whistles coming through all the time. It’s really hard to set up assembly lines around it,” Monson says. “We are taking an approach where we are going to beautifully design our two core base units and we are going to constrain ourselves to those units. We strongly believe this is what is going to be our key to being able to achieve the output velocity where others may not have been able to do that same rate.”
Monson says production is currently reliant on manual labor, including many high-skilled technical workers from the former Navajo Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant in Page that ceased operations in 2019. ZenniHome’s factory in Page is on the site of the old Navajo Generating Station. In the future, Monson says ZenniHome plans to develop a “Factory 2.0” that leverages robotic automation to create a high-volume, high-output factory that has the capability to produce tens of homes per day on the production line.
“Factory 2.0 is our biggest North Star right now, getting to the point where we are producing the highest quality, attainable housing at a very rapid scale,” Monson says. “Given the price point [and] the housing shortage, there are so many needs for housing that our current industry—as rapid as they are moving—cannot keep up with. We are bringing an innovative approach to solve some of those problems.”
ZenniHome has model homes available for touring in Mesa, Arizona, and will be breaking ground on its first multifamily project, 29 West, in Mesa in the coming weeks. The company has over 40,000 units soft-ordered from multifamily developers, government entities, or individuals for residential purposes.
