New Green Ideas for the Home

Calling home acquires new meaning with an application by Our Home Spaces, which turns an iPhone into an energy monitor and thermostat.

It allows you to turn the furnace and the water heater on and off from wherever you happen to be. The system works with Proliphix thermostats. It was one of many products shown at this year’s West Coast Green environmental showcase, which  took place on the two main piers at San Francisco’s picturesque Fort Mason. A novel 200 foot-long bamboo trellis demonstration garden by Design Ecology — resembling a line of teepee frames –

connected the exhibit halls and served as the emblem of the show.

The walkway’s native and drought-tolerant plant habitat, shown above in a schematic, illustrated key storm water filtration strategies: landscape buffer, hanging gardens as pre-filtration, and in-situ water treatment. Plans for a floating exhibit did not work out this year but I think a modern demonstration houseboat with a living roof would be a great draw in the future — call it the SS Green Living!

Here are some other new home products that stood out.  Nick Lee (Houseplans.com Services, Inc. Chief of Design) also toured the show and contributed several discoveries.

Green Lights. This trumpet vine-shaped LED (light emitting diode) pendant light system

is from Energy Savings Technology, LLC, a small Northern California company. The shape is a classic but using it to surround an LED light is new. The company also offers a sleek tube shaped light

for installations over a counter or dining table. According to engineer-founder Gerhard Hoog  these lights provide either warm or neutral white light and up to 80% power savings compared to halogen spots or flood lights. They are fully dimmable.

Renaissance in Wood. That new hardwood floor you have been considering (actually I have been dreaming of replacing the dark brown tile in my kitchen with wood) might be older than you think. Recycled wood for flooring, furniture, and cabinetry is an expanding category at the show, with several companies represented. Wood Anchor, from Winnipeg, Manitoba, specializes in reclaiming and reusing wood from urban elm trees (victims of Dutch elm disease) and demolished grain elevators to produce flooring

as shown above, and they’re always looking for more. As their website says: “Will Work For Wood.” I coveted their stools

reclaimed from old timbers. Earth Forest Products, based in California, reclaims wood from barns, warehouses, and other buildings and also uses wood resulting from re-forestation projects as well as from FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) forests. I liked their “wood sample tree”

shown here. An innovative new wood flooring product was literally uncorked at the show: it’s made from slices of wine corks.

These Showercork™ mosaic tiles by Sustainable Floors have a resilient cushiony feel. They come in 12- by 24-inch by 1/4 inch-thick sheets

and are installed over a mastic, then grouted and sealed with a urethane finish like ceramic tile.

Mediterranean Energy. Solar panel technology is evolving toward flexible systems that form the roof itself and are not simply attached to it. The Solé Power Tile™

by SRS Energy is designed for Mediterranean style roofs and effectively mimics curved clay tiles.

Fresh Air. With new homes becoming air-tight thanks to more efficient insulation and building systems, poor indoor air quality can be a problem. Enter the electric Lifebreath Heat Recovery Ventilator (HRV),

which moves stale, contaminated, warm air from the house to outdoors and draws fresh oxygen-laden air from outside and distributes it throughout the house.

The two air streams pass on either side of an aluminum heat-exchange core that transfers heat from outgoing to incoming air. So on cold days warmth is retained as the air gets refreshed.

Green Days on The Capitol Steps

Take a look at this year’s Solar Decathlon on The Mall in Washington, D. C., ending this week.

Sponsored by the Department of Energy (photo above by Stefano Paltera for DOE), this international competition among college teams to design, build, and operate highly energy-efficient, completely solar-powered houses has resulted in an especially innovative crop of designs. It’s a veritable world’s fair of green architecture. Here are some highlights (photos by Jim Tetro, US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon).

Team Spain — photovoltaic walls and sun-tracking roof:

Team Germany — louvers of integrated thin-film copper indium selenide cells (CIGS):

Cornell University – corrugated drum shapes and solar panels:

Team California — solar power and maximized indoor-outdoor living:

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — Midwest farmhouse forms and recycled barn wood:

The Ohio State University– recycled wood and solar collectors:

Rice University — growing walls:

This year winning teams will be awarded $100,000 over two years to support the Solar Decathlon’s research goal of reducing the cost of solar-powered homes and advancing solar technology. Check out the Solar Decathlon website for in-depth coverage. What a great way to use the nation’s outdoor living room below the Capitol! Members of Congress strolled this “solar subdivision” on their front lawn with evident interest.

Drawing from Disney

Walt Disney was fascinated with the shaping of space both visually and physically, from the way he transformed the animated film to his invention of the modern theme park. I think architecture was always an important theme for him, like the shiny-bright suburb in the Goofy cartoon Motor Mania of 1950 or the suave contemporary ranch house in the original Parent Trap of 1961. I vividly remember touring Monsanto’s  House of the Future at Disneyland

(image fromYesterland.com) with its curvilinear white plastic pods

cantilevered over a central support and utility podium (Yesterland.com). Though designed not by Disney but by two MIT professors — who must have been channeling Buckminster Fuller

and his similarly central-masted Minimum Dymaxion house of 1929 — Walt had the sense to give the plastic Monsanto house a ten-year lease in Tomorrowland. The swoopy modern  furniture from fifty years ago

still looks contemporary today (Yesterland.com photo)

I was reminded of these images and Disney’s huge influence on design and our appreciation of it when I toured the superb new Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco’s Presidio, which opened last week. Two hours flew by. I felt I had stumbled into an animated autobiography, or rather, a compelling four-dimensional biopic.

San Francisco’s Page & Turnbull Architects have deftly inserted the state-of-the-art museum

into an historic 19th century brick row (photo by Cesar Rubio) along the Presidio’s parade ground — which is itself like a distant extension of Disneyland’s own Main Street. From the front there’s no hint of the wonderland within. And at the rear only an elegant glass skin

drawn across an addition (photo by Bruce Damonte) suggests a house of marvels. You experience the museum as a journey through Walt’s life with text blocks, still images, film clips, memorabilia, and narrations by Walt and others every few feet along a carefully choreographed and roughly chronological path. It’s a soft cacophony of sounds and images,  a “dark ride” that you walk, and even then it’s impossible to absorb everything.

Highlights for me are the multi-story “multiplane camera” that allowed Disney  filmmakers to create a realistic sense of depth within animations, the clever elevator that’s designed as a train car (the vertical naturally becomes the horizontal in this Looking Glass world), and the sleek modern terrazzo-and-glass mini-Guggenheim ramp

(image courtesy Walt Disney Family Museum) spiraling around a huge and meticulously detailed scale model of Disneyland.

In one sense it’s all a bit deifying, as if Walt were a latter day King Tut, but — as they say in Egypt — what a cool tomb! And here the hieroglyphics even dance to Silly Symphonies.

Beyond the Casino

I was also in Las Vegas last week, for a talk about Cliff May’s ranch houses at the World Market Center, which is another sort of  “ride.”

Well off the Strip on the north end of town across from City Hall (you can see the Stratosphere Casino tower in the background), this enormous furnishings marketplace is a contemporary landmark in its own right. The complex consists of a series of interpenetrating cubes and polygons that wrap around a 15 story tall central court that’s open to the sky,

like a box canyon from Red Rocks Park  reassembled as a building. It feels like the entrance to Oz. One of the great things about this design center is that it’s open to the general public, not just to professional designers. The Center’s Design Salon

offers consumers the ability to purchase designer furnishings previously offered only to the trade. Complimentary one-hour consultations with interior designers accredited by the American Society of Interior Designers are also offered. It’s a good place to get ideas for shaping or reshaping your home.

A short ride away is the new 180 acre Springs Preserve, Las Vegas’ answer to Tucson’s Living Desert Museum, and built on the site of the original springs for which the city is named (vega means spring in Spanish).

Here’s one of  the rotundas, recalling a sculptural sundial or open cistern. Part of the vast indoor-outdoor complex comprises a  sustainability hall where one gallery has  been turned into a model home — which puts a novel recycling spin on that overworked trademark phrase “what’s done in Vegas stays in Vegas.” One of the most effective exhibits here

simply shows how much water is used in a typical five-minute shower with and without a low flow showerhead. (Nothing about sand baths, however…) Elsewhere in the museum you can experience a simulated desert flash flood (perhaps the other side of sustainability?) which in this case is fun: inside one of the buildings you stand on a metal bridge across a boulder-strewn arroyo and suddenly the water surges around and under you.

So what does it signify, when Disney comes to San Francisco and resource conservation arrives in Las Vegas? That may sound like the resolution of some distant prophecy but I think it means that things are looking up.

In other news, check out Writer Tracey Taylor’s  fine article about about us and affordable home design in the Financial Times! Her website tktaylor.com includes a wide range of stories about design and is a must read.

Lights, Camera, Buildings!

You can learn a lot about how great architects shape space from the range of design documentaries now available.  For example, Checkerboard Films has just released Ray Kappe, California Modern Master: 40 Years of Modular Evolution, which explores the career of one of America’s most innovative and influential architects.

From the cover alone you get the sense that this designer is interested not just in thinking but leaping outside the box. See how roof planes, floor planes, and wall planes extend outward and upward as if reaching to infinity.  Stretching the mind is definitely part of Kappe’s approach — he was the founder of SCI-ARC (the Southern California Institute of Architecture), which has taught generations of talented architects  –  many of whom I covered for Sunset. Ray went to U. C. Berkeley and worked briefly for the Bay Area firm of Anshen & Allen, designers of many mid-century modern houses for developer Joe Eichler, before settling in Los Angeles.

The film explores in depth (or height!) the house he designed for his wife Shelly and their family in 1967: a series of seven interpenetrating trays suspended over a steep upslope. It’s wonderful to experience the house cinematically because, to my mind anyway, that’s how it was designed: as a kind of three dimensional film strip.

The warm wood-and-glass framed levels are supported on four 8- by 12-foot concrete, skylit towers that form the bathrooms and the kitchen. Cantilevers allowed him to get an expansive, multi-layered house on a very tight site. In the film Ray mentions his interest in the work of Paul Rudolph — whose Art & Architecture Building at Yale is a sculptural extravaganza of interpenetrating layers — and you can see Rudolph’s almost Baroque spatial sensibility resonating throughout Kappe’s design.

When Ray and Shelly kindly gave me a tour some years ago I marveled at how everything overlapped. Here’s an image of the living room,

(both photos courtesy of Kappe+ DU Architects) showing how the space overlooks a study and is in turn overlooked by the bedroom level. I asked Shelly how they brought up children in such an open interior where railings are either glass or just not there, and she said: “Oh they simply learned where the edges were.” There are no handrails in the stairway either, which, as Ray explains in the film, is a way to make people more aware of what they’re seeing. I might call it the power of the double take…or just plain fear of flying. Also the Kappe children always helped hand the groceries up. Living in the house must have had an effect: their son Ron Kappe is a distinguished architect in his own right.

Ray Kappe’s recent modular, LEED platinum-rated “Living Home” for prefab entrepreneur Steve Glenn is also shown in the film. The Checkerboard series includes documentaries on Yoshio Taniguchi (designer of New York’s Museum of Modern Art),  Philip Johnson, Sir John Soane and others.

Other design films for your Netflicks cue should include the following two. Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner,

presents the work of another towering LA innovator. Lautner used concrete and glass in radically sculptural ways and his houses — no two alike — often became stage sets for Holywood movies, especially James Bond films. I met Lautner long ago when I was writing about one of his houses and he told me: “When you design a house you’ve not only got to design the house, you’ve got to design the site, and you’ve got to design the client.” Now that’s a custom house!

The other must-see is My Architect: A Son’s Journey,

the extremely moving exploration of Louis Kahn’s career and life by his son Nathaniel Kahn.  The Salk Institute in La Jolla, California is perhaps his most famous building, but he also worked outside the US. I saw this film with my recent college graduate daughter. At the end, when a man tells Nathaniel that Kahn’s Parliament Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh “gave us democracy,”  I couldn’t help dissolving into tears. My daughter recoiled at my emotional response: “Get a grip, Dad!” Well, what can I say? Good design can be affecting on the big screen.

Wood Flooring 101

Look down: what’s the floor for you? It’s a huge subject so I asked materials expert Rob Jones of Build Direct, an online warehouse, to give us an introduction to the most popular wood floor options he’s seeing at the moment (not including solid wood floors, which are defined as floors that are real wood throughout). I have edited his notes for space.

Strand-Woven Bamboo

Strand-woven bamboo is a subset of bamboo flooring made from the parings of conventional bamboo floors.The example below is by Yanchi.

The parings are the left-over strips of bamboo that result from the manufacturing process, when the rounded bamboo stalks are cut for flat flooring boards. The parings are then woven together, heated, put under pressure, and laminated into flooring boards. Because this flooring is made from a renewable resource and from post-industrial material, you could call it “super green.” The result is a very hard attractive flooring surface that takes stain easily and stands up to high traffic.

Laminate Flooring

The news in laminate flooring is that thicker options — 12 millimeters and up — are now available.

This example is Toklo laminate. Such a floor incorporates no real wood, but an image of a wood grain and colour on what is called a decor layer. The thicker the floor, the more like a real wood floor it becomes in terms of a walking experience. And laminates from 12mm to 14mm are still priced at less than a solid hardwood floor. Laminate floors with attached underpad are easier to install than typical laminate floors, adding to their popularity with do-it-yourselfers and contractors.

Engineered Wood

Engineered floors are considered “real” hardwood floors, with a top layer of real wood, which ranges in thickness from a fraction of a millimetre up to 4mm over a core of medium density fibreboard (MDF) and a backing layer, which allows greater resilience. A glue-less click-locking system eases installation. Here’s an example of Brazilian cherry

by Vanier. Another choice is handscraped engineered hardwood flooring,

shown here in a Peppercorn example from Burlington. Handscraped is popular because the contours in each board add texture and aesthetic versatility. These engineered versions are making the look more affordable.

Rob’s Notes on Retail Pricing

Bamboo. $2.50 – $8.00 per square foot. Factors that affect this pricing include grade, which accounts for more consistent and more vibrant natural colors, the cost of staining, and milling standards which affect how the boards fit together.

Laminate. $0.75 to $2.00/square foot. Some important factors affecting price are thickness, locking systems, and AC rating. The last factor is an international test that determines how much wear a laminate flooring product has been proven to take, with the results applied to where it is recommended it be installed. For instance, an AC3 rated floor is recommended in general residential usage. Under AC3 are to be installed only in low-traffic residential settings (bedrooms for instance, rather than front halls). Above AC3 laminates can be applied to commercial settings of varying degrees of traffic. It’s hugely important to take these things into account when shopping, which is why the tests are done. There are prices listed for $0.50, but these are usually ‘bait and switch’ deals on shopping engines. There are equivalent ‘bait and switch’ products in every category of flooring.

Engineered. About $2.50 – $7.00 per square foot. Species is a huge factor, plus the thickness of the real wood layer, overall thickness, and locking system.

Hardwood. $4.00 – $10. There are loads of factors which affect this pricing, all of which are named above in the prices for engineered flooring, but finished, unfinished, and handscraped and brushed effects are also big factors.

Final notes: Rob says two recent forces are affecting the wood flooring industry. One is the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, which places limits on formaldehyde emissions in flooring. The other is the Lacey Act , which is concerned with the harvesting and importation of wood products, among other natural resources, into the United States. Thanks for all the helpful info, Rob!

Customize Your Plan With Contemporary Cabinetry

Now that we’re able to offer copies of rare mid-century modern Eichler plans, it’s important to think about how you can update and customize them — or indeed any plan — for today.  For example, adding storage space can be an important consideration. Cabinetry is one way to go:  Seattle’s Kerf Design — an especially inventive cabinetmaker specializing in sleek, vividly hued eco-friendly units — shows how, with everything from

entire walls of different sized open-and-closed compartments, to

sideboards for storage and display in the dining room or hall to

elegant and efficient vanities to

character-building kitchen cabinets, cubbies, and drawers. I like their three-pronged philosophy: honesty of material, which means revealing the beauty of the plywood edge; honesty of construction: keeping things simple with exposed   joinery, asymmetrical arrangements, inset doors and drawers, and notched hand holes; and honesty of function:  making sure there is a reason for every detail. I also love their color palette

as in this thin console, which to my eye is irresistible. And Kerf’s work is all green, using only FSC-certified plywood made with formaldehyde-free glue and finished using a process that eliminates all volatile organic compounds (VOCs). They also have a lower cost do-it-yourself product line that is shipped flat for you to assemble.

Kerf’s work is especially appropriate for modern houses because it embodies similar architectural values –  but it can invigorate almost any interior. Interestingly, Kerf’s founder, Nathan Hartman, just told me that his cabinets are being installed in a remodeled Eichler right now.

Build Your Own Updated Eichler

Thinking beyond storage solutions, here are some other suggestions to get you pondering how to make an Eichler layout — or any house plan for that matter — your own unique design. Take a look at Gregory La Vardera’s  Spirit of Palo Alto,  Plan 431-11, shown below,

in a view of the rear elevation. The layout

is itself an update of  a classic Eichler atrium plan.  In fact it’s very close to our Eichler Plan 470-4, shown below:

Now, see how Greg tweaked the original plan for today. He took the washer and dryer out of the garage and gave them their own laundry room set between garage and kitchen; part of the laundry functions as a mudroom or family entry. And he opened up part of the kitchen to the living room by replacing a  wall and a door with a peninsula/buffet bar, as shown in this interior view:

The idea, according to Greg was to create a balance where “the kitchen is still a discrete room even though it may be open to the living space.” He also added a kitchen island to expand the counter space.

Another major change is in the master suite. Today most people want a feeling of spaciousness in the master bathroom, along with bigger closets. As this cropped view of Greg’s plan shows,

he reconfigured the bathroom to accommodate twin vanities, which give a more luxurious feel without adding a lot of space — in his view “bigger bathrooms = more bathroom cleaning. Yech.”  Similarly he installed closets along the bedroom’s two interior walls instead of using a walk-in closet, which he considers a space hog.

Or consider architect Robert Nebolon’s Palomino Plan 438-1, which is an adaptation of an existing Eichler: his own house. The following view is from the backyard and shows how the family room opens to the rear patio.

A key move was to divide the galley kitchen into two sections –

one for  cooking and eating, one for and storage and desk work — while connecting it to the family room and living area on either side. He also added such eco-friendly elements as low-e glass skylights, a roof that’s composed of 10.5 inch-thick Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) and is designed to support photovoltaic panels, and a fireplace insert instead of a conventional wood-burning fireplace (such units do not require a chimney).

Consider these ideas when you use our Customizer Tool. Then work with our Design Department, run by Chief of Design Nicholas Lee. We’ll help you create your own unique living environment, whether it’s modern or traditional or something in between.