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In the world of design, describing anything as "prefab" is usually an insult. But thanks to Karim Rashid -- the same guy who made a wastepaper basket into a must-have design object -- the next time the doorbell rings, it might be UPS with your cool new house in a really big box.

More swinging futurist pod than ready-for-assembly, Karim Rashid's Kit 24, making its debut this weekend at the Interior Design Show in Toronto, is a prefab house designed to appeal to high-end tastes. Based on a metaphor for time, it's 24-sided, with a free-flowing and open interior meant to work for all of the various requirements of a space over a 24-hour day.

Sponsored by The Globe and Mail, and fabricated by Toronto-based Prototype Design Lab, the free-standing structure is built of digitally designed aluminum panels grommetted together just like an aircraft. Its form is reminiscent of a psychedelic spacecraft, or a vividly coloured Terry's chocolate orange, and the whole thing can be plunked down and assembled within days for roughly $150 a square foot (plus shipping, site prep and assembly).

As expected from the visionary famed for his swoopy, high-tech style, Rashid's model is not only hot pink, lime and orange, it's also tricked out with the latest gadgetry, and furnished with his signature blobs and decorated with giant vinyl stick-on decals of sound waves and Slinky motifs (although the ultimate charm of the kit house, besides the price, is that it can be customized to any aesthetic).

Says Rashid, in a release, "I have always loved the idea of a kit house . . . I wanted to show the contemporary approach, a really positive, interesting and artistic space for living inspired by technology."

Kit homes aren't new -- Sears, Roebuck sold about 100,000 of them by mail order from 1908 to 1940. But lately, as surviving early-20th-century kit houses have emerged as collectors' items for the design-savvy, architects and design gurus have been turning their attention to what is arguably the most democratic and efficient of designs.

Not only Rashid but other hot names have come out recently with prefabs: Charlie Lazor of Minneapolis-based Blu Dot calls his FlatPak house, a modular eight-foot-wide minimalist puzzle of wood, glass and steel, "a kind of kit of parts, like Garanimals."

Office of Mobile Design's latest effort, called Take Home, offers a ready-made home complete with eco-friendly bamboo flooring. San Francisco-based Christopher Deam's Perfect Cottage, which comes fully assembled on a flat bed with wheels for $45,000 (U.S.), is really a modernist cedar-clad RV.

But inspired as they are by the possibility of bringing high-end design to the masses, they can't escape comparison with the kind of utopian vision that was Monsanto's House of the Future at Disneyland's Tomorrowland back in the sixties.

Now that we are actually living in the 21st century, it's funny how the future can still look like it did on The Jetsons. But in the opinion of architect Dennis Askins, overseeing the construction for Rashid in Toronto, there is nothing nostalgic or retro about Kit 24.

"It's a beautiful object that plays on this idea of 24-hour usage with one open space on two levels that in no way recalls a traditional loft aesthetic," Askins says. "It's a clean construction, but has a lot of playfulness and emotion at the same time. If I had to name the style, I'd call it 'sensual minimalism.' "

Judge for yourself by following the pink carpet down to Kit 24 at the Interior Design Show. At this time of year, it's worth it for the burst of life-renewing colour alone.

Karim Rashid will speak at 11 a.m today at the Hugo Boss Stage at the Interior Design Show. The show runs until tomorrow at the National Trade Centre, Exhibition Place in Toronto, http://www.interiordesignshow.com.