By reflecting back the trees on the sidewalk, the mirrored windows on the back of this house create the impression of an apparently empty wall with windows looking through to a forest instead of into a solid house.

The forest apparently captured in the house on the street side of this innovative home from Djuric Tardio Architectes is the first of many delights in this charming eco home in the French suburbs.

The entire top of the house has an unusual gabled trellis over a full sized roof deck.

This gabled shape was in order to conform to a building code requirement that the house have the same gable shape as its neighbors.

But the architect has turned that requirement on its head. Instead of the liability of just another dark cramped attic, this is an asset.

Instead of a dark attic the young family has another place to play.

Uncluttered and simple, the roof deck offers a wide open vista on the tight space, as well as a row of skylights that provide passive warmth for the house inside.

The gabled trellis can be planted up with vines for a rooftop garden.

The empty space avoids finality, and lets the imagination roam with possibilities. Sustainably-sourced Finnish wood was used throughout.

The view back through the pleasing open house is open to the street (the mirrored windows are clear viewed from this side) is a model of passive design.

plan

Huge sliding walls slicing the spacious living area make the library off limits when parents need to focus.

But open, the library flows effortlessly from the main living area.

Passive design brings sun all the way in from a skylight wall that goes all the way back to the kitchen.

This skylight on the edge of the house ends with a double height window that opens up the space to passive heating and gives the lofty feeling of a double height ceiling.

But actually, as these varied ceiling heights show, the high wall ends above the sliding doors, where it cradles a playroom upstairs.

But light bounced between these skylights and double windows is the only warming needed.

The playroom upstairs is young and fresh with a refreshingly simple loft-like layout.

The playroom opens out to one side of the deck overlooking the garden.

The deck is planted with vegetables and fruits like kiwifruits and grapes.

The plants are irrigated by a rainwater harvesting system.

In such a cramped space between the neighbors, this house is an absolute miracle of freedom, with many light-filled, open spaces.

Almost suggesting a barn in the country, with its grasses planted at the edges, this is a home with many roomy places to escape and dream.

This is a post from Home Design Find

Innovative Eco Home Brings Joie de Vive to the French Suburbs

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Wow. This has been a very long time coming.

This work by a U.S. architect – who really gets the solar aesthetic – was uncovered by my friend Tafline Laylin over at Inhabitat.

The zHome community designed by David Vandervort in Issaquah, Washington incorporates solar into the overall design right from scratch.

Look at how elegantly the sun-facing shed roof repeats, not only soaking up all those rays, but making good clean power using a lot more beautiful design than traditional energy does.

(By contrast, imagine an ugly coal power station making that same power on your roof!)

With just ten homes, it is the size of a good little community where everyone knows each other, fostering neighborliness and friendships.

That neighborliness is also indirectly sustainable. We will be much more interdependent in a future world of wild weather, needing each other for much more than a borrowed cup of sugar.

The central courtyard, the shared composting and garden all serve to foster community.

Around the edges, the electric-car-ready car access. I love it!

Each of these town homes goes from its roof to the ground (just like a freestanding house does), and opens out to the courtyard at the bottom.

The solar panels are enough to power 100% of the homes. Passive design lowers energy use as well, and in addition, ground heat pumps moderate temperature extremes so that heating and hot water are also supplied efficiently.

Excellent and responsible design.

This is a post from Home Design Find

Zero Energy Community Designed to Foster Solar Production

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Have you ever yearned for lightweight, sustainable furniture that can fold down to a flat pack when it’s time to move? If so, you may be happy to hear about the furniture from Karton. Karton’s pulp pieces are German-made.  Every piece is flat-packed but unfolds to reveal a sturdy, economical piece of useful furniture. According to Karton,  “a clever (and relationship-saving) system of folds and tabs makes assembly a cinch with no tools or glue required. The result is stunningly simple cardboard furniture you can live with; equal parts brute strongman and lightweight drifter. Move it, store it, recycle it or leave it exactly where it is“. The best part of all is that Karton’s pieces cost only a few dollars each, making it possible to furnish an entire apartment or home for practically nothing.

Above, imagine waking up in a cardboard bed.  The “Paperpedic” is a cardboard bed base which can morph from a single bed to a king-sized bed in minutes. The bed has a load capacity of close to a ton and can sleep several people comfortably. You can add drawers if you’re in need of extra storage. The cost of the bed is only $188. Four drawers are $62.

Above, check out the Paperpedic bedside table which can accompany your bed. The table, which includes a drawer and an open storage space below, costs $74.

Below, the cardboard wizardry extends to a work storage unit which could be used for files, magazines and other work papers. The unit costs $312.

Below, check out a Karton end table. The table costs $74.

And here’s a detail shot, showing exactly how the tables are constructed:

Ready to pulp out your home? Check out the full Karton collection.

This is a post from Home Design Find

Design Dilemma: Flat-pack Furniture On a Dime

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A new way for living in the 21st century enabling humanity to coexist in harmony with the natural world is demonstrated by OOZE architects for Gundala, near the city of Hyderabad in India.

‘Forest Life’ is an eco-community mixed residential and commercial project incorporating natural living in symbioses with nature.

Each living unit has one front access to a street and one back access to the green.

The garden is experienced as an extension of the living room.

Every unit is unique.

A climatic skin reinterpreting the traditional ornamental “Jali” (perforated stone or latticed screen) wraps around the living spaces.

It is an evolving feature which can change according to the orientation and the privacy requirements for each unit.

Each of the units is different, but common features are roof gardens, patios and balconies that invite the surrounding nature, blurring boundaries between inside and outside.

Each unit is accessible by car, on foot or by bicycle.

The interconnections between the different small quarters were one of the most important criteria of the urban design.

The client brief was very strict about following Vastu principles, resulting in a specific orientation north and south, and precise rectangular proportions.

An ecological greenbelt of forest winding through the site allows for migrations through the development keeping the surrounding ecosystem intact.

The greenbelt creates an interesting combination of a strict matrix grid and the natural elements of the site: forest, water, topography.

Every place can be reached via a network of pathways, both manmade and natural, through the green space.

Via Arch Daily

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Futuristic Indian Eco Community Follows Traditional Vastu Rules

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A new way for living in the 21st century enabling humanity to coexist in harmony with the natural world is demonstrated by OOZE architects for Gundala, near the city of Hyderabad in India.

‘Forest Life’ is an eco-community mixed residential and commercial project incorporating natural living in symbioses with nature.

Each living unit has one front access to a street and one back access to the green.

The garden is experienced as an extension of the living room.

Every unit is unique.

A climatic skin reinterpreting the traditional ornamental “Jali” (perforated stone or latticed screen) wraps around the living spaces.

It is an evolving feature which can change according to the orientation and the privacy requirements for each unit.

Each of the units is different, but common features are roof gardens, patios and balconies that invite the surrounding nature, blurring boundaries between inside and outside.

Each unit is accessible by car, on foot or by bicycle.

The interconnections between the different small quarters were one of the most important criteria of the urban design.

The client brief was very strict about following Vastu principles, resulting in a specific orientation north and south, and precise rectangular proportions.

An ecological greenbelt of forest winding through the site allows for migrations through the development keeping the surrounding ecosystem intact.

The greenbelt creates an interesting combination of a strict matrix grid and the natural elements of the site: forest, water, topography.

Every place can be reached via a network of pathways, both manmade and natural, through the green space.

Via Arch Daily

This is a post from Home Design Find

Futuristic Indian Eco Community Follows Traditional Vastu Rules

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In a village on Teshima, an island lying in the Seto Inland Sea, a vacant house set among the old houses of the village, was converted by architect Koichi Futatsumata from CASE-REAL into a dormitory.

Depopulation in the isolated village has left many houses vacant.

The idea was to make the most of a vacant house, as an example of a way to cope with depopulation, a problem for Japan, by making a dormitory for restaurant workers.

The interior space is comprised of three private rooms and a lounge, and a small courtyard set in the middle.

The huge white terrace extends out to the open space bringing a sense of relief and freedom.

Inside and out, woods, stones, and plasters are all in whites, with different expressions and tones.

Restful white makes a peaceful dormitory, allowing sleep day or night for restaurant shift workers.

In Japan, white is not only a symbol of new beginning, but the sacred color representing purity, innocence, and peace.

All the furnishings and functional features of the dormitory are in various white materials.

The only break can be seen laying down. Here are some of the original rafters from the old house that was their before.

The deteriorated traditional Japanese style roofing shingles were replaced.

The new roof followed the basic form and color of the original, elegantly integrating old and new.

But the dark wood exterior, remembered by the villagers, cladding the existing wall facing the lane was left untouched.

This sensitive integration of new and old gently expands the language of the existing architecture on the island.

New elements of new Japanese style, like these beautiful doors, are are carefully blended in without clashing with the surrounding village, which remains unchanged from ancient times.

Photographs: Hiroshi Mizusaki

Via Arch Daily

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A Lovely Re-use in an Ancient Japanese Village

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Often when artisanal types approach the web, their interface still looks much more like a page in the real textured world than the usual web designed pixels and Dave Hakkens – who has come up with a delicious way to make eco flooring out of ground-up materials from demolished buildings – is no exception.

Here is the front page of his web site where he explains how you could turn demolished buildings (bricks, metal, glass and all) into new flooring (or cladding?) materials with the previous building captured and reused as new building material (just one of Dave’s many interesting ideas illustrated on his site.)

Some of the materials get ground up into a fine powder, and are used as pigmentation in a new cement base, and others are left as a loose rubble.

Although Dave is grinding and molding new slabs by hand (to illustrate the idea), this process could be mechanical – making a very efficient way of reusing old building material.

Each of these newly created slabs of ground-up materials is quite solid and heavy, as you see here. Presumably it could be molded into any shape and size that can be easily handled.

One of the most beautiful is orange brick rubble like this, but suspended in a glassy mix, as seen in this video of how he mixes the materials together.

But even roof tiles and nails make an industrial-chic object of much greater beauty than the original materials.

Instead of having to reuse whole pieces of old buildings, which is quite a labor intensive form of reuse, Dave’s method of just grinding them up wholesale could make building recycling much more automated and cheap to do.

This is a post from Home Design Find

Eco Floors from Bricks, Glass… and Nails?

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Think you’d freeze living above the polar circle with no heat in your apartment? Think again.

This beautiful apartment building in Norway, has been designed by Steinsvik Arkitektkontor AS to capture and hold so much warmth that it does not need to burn any fossil energy heating source at all.

Super-tight insulation and cutting-edge heat recovery technology keep the – natural and untreated wood – insides toasty warm.

Like Finland and other chilly Scandinavian nations, Norway is among the pioneers of Passiv Haus design, which completely seals up houses so no air gets in at all, other than through a two-way ventilation system that uses the waste heat of the house itself to heat incoming fresh air.

In addition, it uses thermic collectors in the ground for pre-heating/cooling of the air intake, and a buffer tank for the heat collection systems combined with a backup air-to-water heat pump.

This system stores and delivers energy to the radiant heating system in the floors.

While the colder north-facing side of the home is almost completely covered to protect against heat loss, the south facing roof is covered in solar panels, that provide electricity and heat.

Of course, not every day is sub-arctic cold. Even though Norway has two months a year with no sun at all, the apartment building can be powered by solar energy for the other ten months.

Via Inhabitat

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Above the Polar Circle, Zero-Heat Apartments

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One of the most interesting approaches to the use of skylighting for daylighting a building involves a reinforced concrete live work space in Takasaki, Japan by Ikimono Architects - that has no roof at all, and a dirt floor.

The entire ceiling is all glass. Every minute of the day’s ever changing racing cloudscapes, from sun up through the moonlit night is unfiltered by the slightest interruption.

The shatterproof glass roof is all that stands between the occupants and the sky.

Many buildings are designed “to bring the outside in”, but only do so horizontally, and visually.

This live/work space is only separated from nature around its edges: nature has literally been invited indoors.

Not only open to the sky’s dynamically changing days and seasons – but the space also has a dirt floor.

Trees have been planted in the dirt floor that will one day provide a real canopy of shade from the sun overhead.

In this way, over the years, an industrial site will truly return nature to the occupants.

The interior is tall enough to embrace the tallest possible tree growth within its walls. Much taller than needed to house the sleeping loft for its inhabitants.

By night, light is emitted not only from the tall window, but also through the glass roof. One day, the treetops will be visible through the window.

This is a post from Home Design Find

Live/Work Space Will Grow Trees in Dirt Floor

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Berkeley locals commonly recycle these to replace broken car parts like doors and mirrors.

So the idea to use the parts left behind – car roofs – as cladding for a building, came naturally to the architects.

Designed to be waterproof, and overlapped like roofing shingles to keep water out, car roofs in the dull grays and blues commonly found in automobiles even look a bit like slate shingles.

The pair sourced salvaged car roofs to clad the upper outside walls of the McGee house. They cut the scraps into long tile-like shapes and lapped them like shingles.

For the first floor walls they recycled a waste product from the furniture industry of North Carolina, the rough outer bark off trees.

An elegant awning composed of Dodge Caravan side windows tops the second floor balcony.

The interior is wide open and airy with high ceilings and large windows, and clean energy from solar panels keep the lights on.

Polished concrete floors, colored with natural earth pigments, safely sequester 50% fly ash cement; sealed with soy-based Soycrete binder, and cellulose insulation keeps it toasty warm.

Local salvage yards (plentiful in eco-minded Berkeley) supplied all the wood for detailing throughout the home, and the wooden floors are polished with a plant resin floor finish from Bioshield.

Via Gizmag

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Salvaged Parts Create an Eco Home in Berkeley

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