Episdoe 1 - Kaveh Khatibloo, CEO of Stillwater Dwellings

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Transcript

- Prefab Review (PR)

Hi my name is Michael Frank and this is the Prefab Review podcast presented by Prefab Review where we interview leading people and companies in the prefab housing industry to learn more about them and make it easier for buyers to make the best decision about your next prefab or modular project. Today we're interviewing Kaveh Khatibloo. Sorry if I butcher the name. He is the co-CEO of Stillwater Dwellings and they are a luxury prefab home designer based in Seattle. So welcome Kaveh.

- Stillwater Dwellings (SD)

Thank you. Good to be here Michael.

- PR

Great. Well just to get started, I know a little bit about Stillwater Dwellings but I really honestly don't know very much about you. It'd be great to understand how you got started in this business.

- SD

Sure absolutely. Hello everyone. I actually started in this industry when I was quite young. I was born in a family of architects in my immediate family as well as cousins, uncles, and extended relatives. So at a very young age I actually grew up in housing with designing our own homes and working in my father's design studio as a teenager just as a draftsperson for many, many years. So when I decided to start my own career, I attended Worcester Polytech in Massachusetts and studied structural engineering and to sort of complement the design skills that I had acquired and after a few years I moved into the prefab industry. And even as a young teenager I was fascinated by the industry itself and I always found that  that's a more progressive way of building a house and to a large degree much more sustainable approach to the custom building industry. And I found the company Massachusetts named Deck House that had been around for many many years.

- PR

Is that Acorn Deck House now?

- SD

That's correct yes. When I joined them in the early 90s they were just deck house, they acquired ACORN which was the competitor a few years after that. And my attraction to that company was they were more of a design centric prefab company and I always personally believe that design should be the forefront of every company even if it's prefab and their philosophy and approach sort of matched my personal beliefs and I worked for them for many many years and until mid 2006-07 I became director of client services for the west coast operation, moved most of the operation to San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle. Then subsequently partnered with Dwell Magazine and some outside architects that were actually very successful in the prefab and we developed a series of homes called Dwell homes by Empyrean and very successful until the housing crash of 2008. After that I consulted for some of the bigger companies in the industry and 2013 joined Stillwater which is a local company at that time quite viewed as a startup and was a very early stage of it. And as a chief sales officer for the company I helped the company grow and then eventually bought the company from the founder and with my current partner John Morgan, we have successfully been able to extend our reach throughout the United States and kind of provided an innovative approach to mid century modern design that I personally am very attracted to throughout the country itself.

- PR

Can you tell me a little bit about Stillwater for those who haven't seen them. And I would encourage you to check out their website or we have some coverage of them on our site as well to see the photos in person. But what do you try to do? What I've seen in the past is very aesthetically nice mostly single family homes. It's a pretty high end product. Can you Tell me more?

- SD

Oh absolutely. Stillwater Dwellings is essentially a design studio concentrating on currently our product line is a mid century modern butterfly r