Universal home-kit builds homes & campers: if IKEA/LEGO had a baby

Nick Newman helped design a modular construction system so anyone with just a mallet and a drill can build their own home. Since co-founding U-Build in 2020, he has built— and watched others build— furniture, garden sheds, tiny homes, and full-sized houses, so it makes sense he’d use the flat-pack box system to turn the company work van into his full-time home. [Watch our first video featuring Nick’s U-Build universal home-build system, a CNC-cut flat-pack design anybody can assemble to make a home: According to Newman, “the U-Build construction system is something like if IKEA and LEGO had a baby. So, it’s these big boxes that can be assembled with a mallet and a screwdriver. Effectively, you start out with your individual panels, which are cut with precision using a CNC machine, and it’s designed with this kind of locking system so you can basically put the pieces together: it would always be on the ’right’ configuration.&qu