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.

House Plans from Italy and India

Our window on the modern home is widening: we’ve recently added some exciting (and exclusive to us) contemporary plans from abroad. Plan 473-1 by architect Lorenzo Spano of Terni, Italy, takes  an artful and sleek approach to indoor-outdoor living, from the cylindrical chimney floating over a circular hearth

that draws your gaze into the landscape (in a retro wave at mid-century modernity), to the dramatic concrete cantilever

that shades one side of the house,

to the seamless connection to a pool terrace on the other side. A roof deck also overlooks the water.

Plan 467-2, by Mumbai architect Rinka D’Monte opens up a simple box with walls of glass.

The floor plan takes the form of two rectangular volumes that appear to slide past

each other, which allows room for private decks at front and rear.  It’s a new twist on the row house idea. We’ll be adding more international plans shortly.

Dutch Design and Other Inspirations in New York

I just returned from New York City, where I visited Governor’s Island off the tip of Lower Manhattan.

It’s a remarkable enclave of early 19th and 20th century Army and Coast Guard houses, barracks, forts, and other structures now being preserved by the Governor’s Island Preservation and Education Committee  (GIPEC), a New York State agency. One model for them might be the public-private joint venture at San Francisco’s Presidio, which was reinvented as a national park.

When I toured the Island the historic officer’s houses (at lower right in photo above) were being used for art installations celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Dutch arrival in New Amsterdam (New York). Droog, the innovative Dutch industrial design and branding firm was one of the participants and worked with artist Marije Vogelzang (she is known as an “eating-designer”) to convert one house into a “Go Slow Cafe” that I found very appealing. I entered an all-white room and was asked to take off my shoes — the first gesture toward slowing down –  and then sat at a white table. Lunch arrived on a simple board, like this:

with circles around each item noting the distance it had traveled. The wood and the food comprised the only color in the space. The point: to slow down, focus on the meal,  and think about the energy used to bring us sustenance. The generous sampling of lettuce and cheese came from less than 100 miles away while the small portion of Chinese lychees (the white fruit at right) came many thousands of miles. For a while I was alone at the table as other visitors ambled past. I felt like part of the installation, which I guess I was. Of course another way to “slow down” like this is simply to have a real conversation with your family over the dinner table!

Droog is a fascinating global firm and reminds me of Marcel Duchamp in the way they transform an everyday object into something unusual, like a clothes hanger into a lamp, shown below:

(This image is from 2modern.com.) The word droog, in Dutch, means “dry” or “wry.” One of Droog’s more provocative products is the “Do hit Chair”:

a metal box that comes with a sledgehammer allowing you to bang it

(and your frustrations, presumably) into shape.

At the Island, Droog took a somewhat calmer, “Do Hit the Cool-It Button” approach (as we have seen) and also supplied products for an intriguing temporary design  store designed by Marcel Schmalgemeijer. He stacked chairs to create shelving and display units like this:

It makes you reconsider the typical rented party chair  — maybe a way to use that leftover furniture in your basement…

Finally, I just had to visit one of the greatest American Beaux Arts monuments: the monumental New York Public Library of 1911, by Carerre & Hastings. Now this is a room for reading!

In the age of Kindles and I-phones, it still has the power to awe and made me appreciate anew the grandeur and majesty that can arise from the intersection of knowledge and imagination. And outside, the famous lions

are still guarding the majestic Fifth Avenue entrance. Read about them and New York’s many other landmarks in the just published Public Art New York by architect Jean Parker Phifer (W. W. Norton 2009).

Deftly written, it’s an indispensable guidebook to every monument worth seeing in Metropolis. From the book I learned that the lions, sculpted by Edward Clark Potter in 1911, are named “Patience” and “Fortitude.” I think they’re good to have around in a time of economic uncertainty. Don’t leave home without them.

Wall Fountains and Water Tables

Water is always a compelling visual and aural feature in a landscape. When a small garden needs a focal point, consider the wall fountain. It can mask street noise or draw the eye and is especially useful as a way to lend character to narrow side yards.  Prefabricated examples abound, like this X3 trough unit from Garden Fountains

or the slim Echo fountain shown below, also from Garden Fountains.

This contemporary example from W Studio, below, bends a wall-like water feature into a piece of sculpture.

If there is more space or an existing pool, a built-in wall fountain can add a dramatic effect. Dallas landscape architect David Rolston specializes in the design of gardens with water features as focal points. Several of his projects show how inventive the simple wall fountain can be.

The small spillway in the low wall turns an entire swimming pool into a fountain.

Or here’s a more rustic feature spilling into a small fishpond from a masonry wall.

This playful chute makes me want to float toy boats down it.

If a more contemplative feel is what you want, a reflecting pool might work — for moonrises and cloudscapes. Here’s a London roof deck that uses the simplest palette of materials — a raised sheet of water, decking, horizontal wood fence, grasses, and a brick chimney — to create a serene outdoor room.

The pool is literally a water — er coffee — table as reflecting pool. The design and the photograph are by Jinny Blom. In a way it’s a descendant of the original water table idea from the Renaissance,

like the one at the Villa Lante near Viterbo in Italy, built for a cardinal, as part of a grand terraced water garden (photographed by leogiordani).  It’s more table than pool; the cardinal liked to cool his wine bottles in the trough at the center (still a good idea!) and the small stream ran through the table and down to the next terrace.

Something a little jazzier, perhaps, with overtones of ancient rituals via Las Vegas, not Rome,

is the fire and water reflecting pool made of basalt by architect Korn Randolph from Water Studio for a Hollywood residence.

Nature and Nurture

Since we’re speaking of water in the landscape, I have to mention a particularly wonderful public example that I just revisited in Portland, Oregon while attending a family wedding. It’s the largest wall fountain around, on par with the Trevi in Rome.

The Ira Keller Forecourt Fountain was designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin in 1970. Halprin’s work includes the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D. C., Freeway Park in Seattle,  and the master plan for Sea Ranch.

The fountain impressed me anew with its power as an interactive  art piece.  The park covers a small sloping city block. At the top, water streams out of the earth in widening channels that stair-step down to deep polygonal pools before roaring over chiseled 30-foot-high concrete cliffs and into the swirl below.  In the roiling pool at the base of the escarpment overlapping concrete platforms appear to float above the water. It’s like a flooding stone quarry — abstract and “super” natural at the same time.

Larry’s wife is the dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin and you can see her influence: the fountain is an irresistible stage play: call it “Total Immersion In Nature.” When I was there several children and at least one adult waded into and around every part of it, galvanized by such a thundering castle of confluence. It  made me think about how the water and the structure work on each each other to create something different, new, and compelling. This is the power of landscape on a public scale. And while most private landscapes can’t include such grand gestures, the best residential gardens help us find refreshment in the natural world in much the same way.

At Home With Nature

We have a lot of granite in our house but it’s not in the kitchen counter: instead there are egg-shaped stones strewn across the mantelpiece and piled elsewhere in baskets and bowls — like hors d’oeuvres from the Pleistocene Era.

My wife is very supportive (er,  long-suffering) and my brother-in-law shares some of this granitic obsession: he once sent me a large and very heavy box. When the mail carrier delivered it he asked me “What have you got in here, rocks?” And of course I had to reply: “Why, yes.”

But in the waning days of summer my thoughts often turn to the seasides and lakeshores where these stones were found, and a little of the vacation feeling returns. I even use one of the rocks as a paperweight on my desk. (I guess it could also be a sort of “writer’s block,” which seems to snowball now and then.) It’s an easy way to incorporate nature — and perhaps even a refreshing Zen moment — into your home.  I am inspired by a painter like Alan Magee, who turns such a simple subject into high art, for example, in his “Convergence” shown below,

which seems to merge painting and sculpture with geology and memory. But I can’t paint so I collect.

Stone and pebble accents in living environments have a long history — just think of the pebble mosaics in some ancient Greek and Roman houses and especially in their communal baths.

This example is from Pella in ancient Greece (Macedonia) courtesy miriam.mollerus at Flickr Creative commons. And by the way, the best book on home life in Roman times that I have read is Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Belknap Press, Harvard, 2008) written with immense verve and a good deal of saucy wit by English classicist Mary Beard. The descriptions of cooking and bathing rituals are especially vivid.

Here’s a somewhat more recent application of the pebble idea: an outdoor shower defined by a wall of pebble stone

tiles from Zation Stone, by Los Angeles designer Justin Davis of True Design Build. (Photo courtesy Sunset.) The tiles enhance the outdoor feeling.

A floor of well grouted stones in the shower

is good for  massaging the feet while you stand under the shower head (example also from Zation Stone).

Stone accents are always possible in the garden, whether as a small Japanesque fountain

like this Natsume basin from Stone Forest, or to support a dramatic fire vessel

from the same company — the big stone has been cleaved in two to form the base for the steel grate.

You can even find a wide variety of pebbles mounted as cabinet and drawer pulls,

like these knobs from Pulls Direct. Or this hook

from Uncommon Goods.

The trick with using rocks as accents is not to overdo it — to suggest nature, not start an avalanche…I guess that would be good advice for me too!

Have another pebble. They’re delicious.

Here are some ideas for giving your outdoor living spaces more comfort and visual oomph.

Planters With Punch. The decorative garden container is evolving: it’s not just about terra cotta anymore. Concrete is coming on as strong in the garden as it is in the kitchen and bathroom, which we saw in the last posting. I’m a fan of the geometric concrete planters by Kornegay, from Phoenix, like their Quartz Series, below:

These hefty faceted containers range from 24 to 43 inches-wide and up to 45 inches-high. The shapes and the integrally colored sunset hues make them dramatic, creating strong focal points on any patio. Or how about Kornegay’s Ribbed Series,

whose repeating circular outlines catch the light, irresistibly drawing the eye.

The company’s newest designs are somewhat more subdued, like the Masaru line,

but are no less elegant and would work well in areas where an understated look is desired.

Or how about a planter that multitasks? Like this one from California’s Obleeek, which is made of lightweight concrete so it’s easier to ship:

It doubles as an end table. And you can have it with a bamboo top,

which adds warmth and style. This example would work well indoors.

Beyond concrete is the rise of  powder-coated aluminum, like these Skittle-colored “Pods” for indoor and outdoor use from Pad Outdoor.

Bet you can’t fill just one!

Fountains of Couth. A recirculating fountain can transform a dry gravel yard into a small oasis, and it doesn’t have to use a lot of water. Here’s an example from sculptor Peter Hanson that animates a small terrace.

It can be enjoyed from inside the house as well as as on the patio itself. Peter’s sculpting is almost invisible — he works with the natural shape of the stone to carve out the basin, making it look as though it was once part of a mountain riverbed. The boulder sits on a bed of pebbles above a pan that collects the overflow for a pump to recirculate.

Peter installed the fountain in Sunset’s Monterey Bay Idea House, where he worked with architect Thomas Bateman Hood and landscape architect Bernard Trainor.

Another example, this time from Stone Forest, known for their carved stone sinks,

sculpts the surface of the stone into delicate ripples, enhancing the fluid effect.

Open Air Cooking. If you can’t stand the heat, then cook outside the kitchen — of course a simple barbecue will suffice, but a generous counter with a built-in grill and perhaps even some built-in seating makes everything better, like this design

by Hood, with landscaping by Trainor. The simple bench seat makes this a true outdoor room. Or here’s a cooking counter and bench covered with milk-chocolate-and-butterscotch-hued Heath Tile

and designed by Cathy Bailey and Robin Petravic, who have brilliantly revived their mid-century modern Heath Ceramics factory — and recently opened an outlet in Los Angeles. (The big news this week is their invitation to the National Design Awards ceremony at The White House. Bravo Cathy and Robin!)

For house plans with grilling porches and other outdoor rooms as part of the layout click on our Outdoor Living and Porchtime collections. Here’s plan 460-3, with the amenities clearly drawn in —

grill in the foreground, planters at right. You just add water.