The plants are in place on our first residential green roof!

Now in their first season, the seedums are taking root and getting established. A soaker hose is being used to water for now As they fill out, the erosion control mat will become less visible, and the roof will retain more rainwater than it currently does. We estimate that the roof should reduce runoff by 50% a that point; however, other portions of the roof drain onto this roof through downspouts, so we are asking a lot of these plantings!

The homeowners installed the multi-layered system and planted on top of the rubber membrane provided by the contractor. They blogged about it in two parts: Part One and Part Two. Take a look, they’ve done well in explaining the process.

This article also appeared in the April 15, 2009 Home and Garden insert of the Northfield News.

This great room is divided by curved ceiling treatments

It isn’t news that the housing market is drastically different. Houses aren’t selling overnight and the flexibility of moving just isn’t there. This means it is time we think differently about our homes and how we wisely make them our own.

Sarah Susanka’s building approach, “The Not So Big House” is celebrating ten years of success. The theory resonates with many home owners: it values quality over quantity and creating a home for yourself, not a generic sales market. Most people who come to Vivus Architecture + Design subscribe to these principles and want design solutions that provide personalized spaces that are right-sized with features that make living easier and more beautiful.

Breaking down the above principles into strategies, these are some of the local interior trends we are seeing:

Phasing
People are doing all the planning up front, and then allowing the projects to take place in a logical and manageable sequence. Often this allows the homeowners to occupy the house during construction and doesn’t require the same upfront financing. Planning also prevents undoing good work that was previously accomplished or the budget-busting “while-we’re-at-its.”

Efficiency
Useful spaces that save time and money are always assets. Organized closets optimally placed save frustration and repurchasing of items that can’t be found. A good kitchen layout makes cooking, cleanup and entertaining easier and more enjoyable for everyone. By designing efficient living spaces, we are often able to reduce the square footage previously anticipated for an addition. This planning is rewarded by construction savings.

Quality cabinetry, flooring and counters save money in the long run

Durability
We are now seeing fewer projects that are short-term solutions: homeowners are installing high-quality cabinetry, flooring and finishes. This may mean an owner will take on a smaller project, but the enduring appeal and life span of the materials make the decision a good one. Navigating through the available selections takes effort and planning, but it pays in the long run when a remodeling lasts for decades.

Family spaces
Families are just as busy as ever, and demand much from their homes. More homes locally are planning for mudrooms. Mudrooms answer many needs: storage, organization, information/scheduling, pet spaces, and sometimes laundry.

Kitchens are designed with built-in places for homework, home offices, entertaining and specialty cooking. Homeowners are upgrading appliances, cabinetry, lighting and flooring to create hard-working and good-looking multi-use spaces. Open connections between rooms can offer new opportunities for entertaining and family connectedness if they are adequately designed to do so.

Coziness
We are seeing less square footage added as more owners opt to create rooms for the whole family: reading, watching TV, playing games and using the computer. Built-in nooks and work counters perform many functions without requiring much floor space. One well-planned hard-working room can replace several others. Instead of a dedicated home office, we often allocate space in or near a common room.

Green
More and more green elements are being incorporated. Energy savings, carbon reduction, kindness to the earth and health are driving factors. We address these desires by designing a tight envelope (good windows, doors, insulation), selecting efficient heating/cooling, and recommending eco-friendly products. Efficiency and durability are strategies that also help “green” a home. Renewable energy systems are an option, too.

Personality
Don’t be afraid to make your home your own. The homes we remember are those with interesting nooks and crannies, fun features or rooms beautifully appointed. It takes a careful hand to decipher what is universally charming and what is over-the-top. We often recommend the unusual strokes be items that can be removed: paint, furniture, accessories. Well-done focal points, quality built-ins and beautiful woodwork are features that appeal to everyone.

Bold tile makes a colorful statement in a concentrated area

Color
Color can enhance woodwork and furniture, set a mood, and optimize natural light. Today’s spaces have touches of bright colors mixed with neutrals. Rooms are planned to have color opportunities: backsplashes, stained glass, and walls that sport a focused hue. Local colors include darker, saturated earth tones (mustard yellows, clay reds, brown-based greens) and deeper neutrals.

As you think about making your current home work better for you, employ the trends listed above to make wise choices about your updates. Planning ahead and good design will reward you with usable and enjoyable spaces that will serve you for many years. Let us know how we can help.

Last Thursday we attended a program sponsored by the CMHC-Canada’s National Housing Agency and the Consulate General of Canada that promoted product applications and sustainable building technologies. Some of the topics were aimed at larger, more commercial buildings, but all of them were applicable to residential construction as well.

The first seminar discussed hardwood flooring and what architects, designers and contractors can do to make more sustainable choices. FSC rating is a good first step to take. (If you didn’t know, the Northfield Smartwood office works with this program.) “Chain of Custody,” the tracking of the end product backward through its distribution and harvest, indicates a more reliable trail of sustainable practices. Not all wood that is stamped comes with this chain of custody. It is more labor intensive to cull out this wood, and often more expensive. Our speaker, Serge Noel, mentioned that the suppliers who are able to use the FSC stamp are very careful to not abuse its use: the entire operation can be denied their certification if used improperly.

Mr. Noel discussed another method to using hardwood flooring more sustainably: specifying different widths of wood. If a particular width is the trend, the remainder of a wood plank may be under utilized. The equipment used to cut the plank to flooring widths typically cuts 2 1/4 and 3 1/4 inch widths. By including a 2 1/2 inch width, they are able to use more of each plank, increasing their output per tree.

Also, by using flooring grades that include random coloration and grading, more of each floor board can be used. (If a 10-foot floor board has consistent coloration except for the last two feet, the two feet will be cut off and placed as a lower grade, such as “cabin.” Streaks and imperfections are handled in the same way.) “Pacific” was the grade Mr. Noel used for the mixed-coloration wood. It is still graded and free from big knots and other imperfections; it just has more character.

So, when deciding what type of hardwood floors you’ll use, ask yourself these questions:
Is the wood I want FSC stamped and does it have the chain of custody paperwork?
Can I use mixed widths of flooring to better utilize each plank? (Think 2 1/4 inch upstairs, 3 1/4 inch downstairs, or call the distributor and see if there is an overstock of one particular width.)
Will the look of a mixed grade be acceptable?

We can help you answer these questions and more to make your project more sustainable and to save unnecessary cutting of trees.

We came across this condition in an historic house we are remodeling.

The wall is balloon framed, then sheathed on the outside. That’s the sheathing in the background. The face of a stud is marked with an ‘X’; wood lath and finish plaster used to be in that plane. The plaster you see is about in the middle of the stud. This was achieved by adding a nailer on both sides of the cavity, attaching wood lath, then plastering.

The process would have been a tremendous amount of labor. Why did they do that?

Perhaps someone out there knows the exact reason, but we can only speculate.

It could have been to provide insulative value, or it could have been to add shear strength to the wall. Perhaps this was a noisy neighborhood, so they tried to shut out sound. Maybe it was a way to train apprentices without having the product visible upon completion!

If you know what the intent was, we would be glad to know! We’re also open to your best guesses…

With a smallish back yard and limited privacy, the owner of this home envisioned a new hot tub on the flat roof over the second floor three season porch. The project involved a master plan for converting the attic to a new master suite, bringing the porch up to four-season use, and remodeling an existing bedroom into a new bathroom on the second floor.

This was no mean task! The hot tub’s weight, including people and water, is about the same as the curb weight of a 2007 Volkswagen Beetle. Routing plumbing for the new restrooms without disturbing the existing first floor finishes also proved to be a challenge (that we were up to!) Add to that working out a feasible master suite layout in the attic with no knee walls and you’ve got a fine architectural adventure.

Working closely with the Owner, we found a way to make it all happen. More shots later of work in progress, but I just can’t pass up the insulation now.

The insulation shown here is a foamed-in-place cement product called AirKrete. It carries a relatively high R-Value, does not shrink after installation, and has great smoke and fire resistance. It will not burn, gives off no smoke or hazardous gasses in a fire, is insect and rodent resistant, and will not offgas. There is no petroleum in this foam, only cement, a foaming agent, and minerals found in seawater.

I’m currently checking with my insurance agent to find out if there will be any savings when we install it in my house. Whatever happens there, we will benefit from high performance insulation, safety and air quality from this product, just as the owners of this house will.

One of the great things about Structural Insulated Panel construction is that things go up quickly once the panels arrive on site. Yesterday only half of the exterior walls shown in this shot were up. This evening, the exterior shell is finished and awaiting interior bearing walls. Shortly, you’ll see floor trusses above and the second floor walls on top of that.

This home is located on Second Street in Northfield, on one of the lots that had previously housed the Northfield Hospital. We worked hard to make the design responsive to the existing homes on the block, yet be a modern home with a sense of itself and its time. Where the front foundations lie, a gracious front porch will provide contact with neighbors on the sidewalk. A hipped roof will mimic the historic four-square homes of Northfield while providing daylight to the central stairs.

Energy efficiency was high on our clients’ wish list. To that end, we located the garage to the northwest to provide some wind break; focused a large portion of the windows south for solar gain; calculated the overhangs to provide shade in the summer and light in the winter; utilized Insulated Concrete Forms for the basement walls; used Structural Insulated Panels on the upper walls; specified a whole-house fan to reduce air-conditioning needs and a air-source heat pump instead of natural gas furnace.

Stay tuned for more as the home is built.

Also, you might check Northfield Construction’s blog, where more photos will likely be posted as well.

We returned to the Midwest Renewable Energy and Sustainability Fair this morning, under the gentle whirring of the wind turbine above the pines.

Today was a day of more workshops.

First, I brushed up on the issue of electric and magnetic fields in homes, spending two hours listening to Spark Burmaster talk about the simple errors in wiring that can have a big effect on fields. Like allergens, people have varying sensitivities to magnetic and electric fields. Careful attention to grounding, grounding, grounding can dramatically reduce fields in the home.

Next I bought a Solar Pathfinder, to help me advise my clients on the suitability of their sites for solar energy systems. The clever device uses simple reflection of the surroundings overlaid on a sunpath chart for the site’s latitude to inform the designer what surrounding objects (trees and buildings usually) will block the sun at what time of year. Photovoltaic panels are extremely sensitive to shading, so this device will help us quantify if your site is right for PV. Solar water heaters are less sensitive, but we can now help you better understand what the impact of that white pine tree will have on your morning shower.

During a break, we checked out the straw bale demonstration hut, which will eventually house composting toilets for the facility. This hut is a load-bearing system, meaning that the bales actually hold up the roof structure.

The entry steps are (obviously) old tires filled with compacted dirt.

And, of course, the plaster work provides a medium that can be artistically inviting as well.

Seeing the hut after yesterday’s seminar makes me want to design and build such a house. If you might be interested, let’s talk!

This is just too cool not to post. It’s the bark of the poplar tree, harvested by hand when a tree is cut down. The bark is then flattened, dried in a kiln, then graded for thickness. It is then sold as siding for your home.

Long lasting? Yes. According to Highland Cratsmen Inc., it can last up to 75 years. Green? Yep. It is even low-maintenance; no chemical treatments or sealers are required. Expensive? On the higher end of the spectrum. FHB reports costs in the $5-8 per square foot range.

Credits: Fine Homebuilding Magazine, Issue 182 put me on to the material, the photo came from the Highland craftsmen website.

Will interested clients, please step forward!

If you think tile is only for the area between your kitchen cabinets and countertops, you need to see the innovative work being produced by Mercury Mosaics in Minneapolis. They use handmade tiles and can do custom textures and colors. If the common ivory plastic switchplates don’t excite you, you can now order their handmade switch plates off their website (rectangular and wow! they also do circular).

And innovative doesn’t have to be resource-intensive. Tracy says, “We also pride ourselves in material usage – having almost no waste since we can use tiles left over from a project for other mosaics. We don’t throw away clay, but continually rework it until it is used up.”

Consider a tile mosaic as a signature element for your next project–and move beyond the predictable.

It looks like an Italian company has worked up a new kind of air freshener, made of concrete!

By including titanium dioxide in the mix, they have found that the concrete will absorb both nitrous dioxide and carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. Both of these are emissions from automobiles, so it makes sense to absorb these gases.

Unfortunately, large quantities of CO2 are generated in the production of concrete in processing and transporting the components and the concrete itself.

They claim is can reduce urban air pollution by up to 40%, a tall order.

Stay tuned, and I’ll let you know if I find out more about how the absorption balances out with the production.

Via Social Design Notes: M&C Science and Nature