Meet Gablok, a Belgium startup that helps you build your own home with revolutionary insulated blocks

As of the second quarter of 2021, the average price of homes in the United States is $349,816. That’s a 20.7% increase from a year earlier when the median was $289,00, according to data from Zillow.com. This price increase is partly due to inflation and excessive money printing as investors move their cash into real assets like real estate, land, precious metals, and commodities.

As home prices continue to rise, one Belgium-based tech startup is on a mission to reduce to cost of home building and help people with dreams of owning their own homes. Gablok was founded with a single objective: to enable anyone to build their own construction project. Gablok also offers alternatives to traditional homes.

Now, with the rising cost of new homes and increasing awareness to build environmentally friendly homes, Gablok is simplifying home construction and offering a simple and efficient kit house system. Unlike traditional home construction, Gablok takes a revolutionary approach to construction using insulated wooden frames and formwork blocks for self-build house projects.

The Gablok concept is a series of insulated blocks, a customized floor system as well as insulated beams and lintels that will allow the building of the exterior and interior walls of a wooden house. The system has been validated by design offices in terms of stability, acoustics, and energy performance.

Founded in 2019, Gablok sells a revolutionary construction method using an insulated wooden frame. In 2018, Gabriel Lakatos has patented a wooden home kit with the objective of simplifying construction and offering a simple and efficient way to build a house by yourself.

The original idea behind Gablok was inspired by interlocking building block toys. In his early childhood, Gabriel was a fan of interlocking and construction games. He worked in the field of traditional construction for 25 years and developed an insulated wooden stacking block. After many months of research and testing, the home self-construction system was validated by engineering offices specialized in structural analysis, energy efficiency, and acoustic performance.

What makes the Gablok concept is its insulated blocks, a customized floor system as well as insulated beams and lintels that will allow you to build the exterior and interior walls of your wooden house (self-construction structure). These items (detailed below) are required to assemble the shell of the isolated frame of your future construction. These are delivered directly to you on the construction site with your installation plan. This process makes it possible, among other things, to avoid the excess waste associated with on-site processing.

After assembling the insulated formworks, all you have left is the construction of the roof (framework + roofing) and the exterior finishing of your home with the finish of your choice (plasters, bricks, cladding, etc). Inside your self-construction, you will start with the execution of various special techniques of your choice (thanks to the space left between the rafters) and then move on to the finishing (OSB + plasterboard, etc). Assembling the system is extremely fast and does not require any drying time.

The self-build flat-pack kit for timber-frame houses provided by Gablok includes all the insulated structural components for your timber frame. In addition, Gablok allows you to build the interior load-bearing walls and the exterior structure of your home.

For the structure, Gablok delivers the self-built insulated wooden blocks to your site on pallets, which saves you the waste associated with on-site processing. The construction is done quickly and your environment remains clean during the entire self-build process.

When the structure of your timber-frame house is finished, all that is left to do is complete the roofing and general finishing (finishing, installing technical elements, etc.).

Below is a time-lapse of quick house assembly with Gablok insulated building blocks.