Aims: In the post-industrial era, housing personalization (i.e. the capacity to adapt living environments to residents’ needs, expectations, and changing life circumstances) has become a fundamental dimension of sustainable housing. Beyond functional adaptation, personalisation enables occupants to express identity, social status, and individual preferences through their homes. Despite the widespread adoption of prefabricated construction, prefabrication is still commonly perceived as limiting diversity and reducing residents’ freedom to modify their dwellings. Rather than assuming fixed patterns of living, housing should be designed to evolve with its occupants. This study investigates the relationship between the scale of prefabrication and the capacity for housing personalisation, proposing an analytical framework that explains how different prefabricated design strategies influence long-term adaptability.
Materials & Methods: This research adopts a qualitative, descriptive–analytical approach. Data were collected through a targeted review of recent scholarly literature and analysed using comparative content analysis. Three analytical indices were derived from the literature: the diversity of personalisation methods, the variability of building components, and the degree of user agency. These indices were then applied to evaluate four housing design strategies—half of a house, support–infill, kit of parts, and completed unit—through a combined deductive–inductive framework. The proposed analytical model was subsequently assessed through a case study of the tunnel construction system used in Iran’s Mehr Housing projects.
Findings: The findings demonstrate that the scale of prefabrication is not merely a technical characteristic but a strategic design variable that directly shapes the potential for housing personalisation. Decisions made during the design stage determine the range of modifications available to residents throughout the building’s operational life. Where long-term adaptability is a primary objective, open-building and incremental completion approaches offer substantially greater capacity for future spatial transformation than fully integrated housing systems. However, realising this potential requires supportive design guidelines, effective regulation of post-occupancy modifications, and coordinated policies involving designers, developers, contractors, and public authorities.
Conclusion: The study identifies a systematic and predominantly inverse relationship between the scale of prefabrication and the capacity for personalisation. As the level of system integration increases, opportunities for user agency and spatial adaptation decline. Conversely, strategies that separate permanent structural elements from changeable components provide the greatest potential for incremental growth, spatial reconfiguration, and adaptation to residents’ evolving needs. Among the approaches examined, the support–infill and half of a house models enable the widest range of personalisation strategies, whereas the kit of parts approach limits variation through a restricted set of predefined configurations, and the completed unit model confines personalisation largely to interior fittings and minor spatial modifications. The Mehr Housing case study further confirms that highly integrated prefabricated systems, while advantageous in construction speed and quality control, significantly constrain long-term adaptability. The principal contribution of this research is the development of a conceptual framework that integrates prefabrication scale, building system typology, user agency, personalisation capacity, and residential sustainability. This framework offers a practical basis for architects, developers, and policymakers seeking to align prefabricated housing systems with sustainability objectives and the changing needs of residents.