The house - i n s p i r a t i o n

July 30, 2017

The house - i n s p i r a t i o n

Sustainable homes (or green homes) look different through out the world. The general idea is to build the house with natural materials such as stone, clay or wood, using the characteristics of the land as a guide for the direction of the house. For example, living spaces with big windows or a built-in green house should be to the south, letting the sun naturally warm those areas, but other rooms -bedrooms, kitchen and bathrooms- should be kept to the north, where it's colder. Another aspect is of course to make sure that the house use as little resources as possible and that used resources are recycled, for example a sewer system that recycles dirty water into clean water.

When designing a sustainable home it helps to look at traditional techniques for your area. This was the reason we choose to build a log home. The typical Scandinavian home was often built with logs and sometimes with a green roof (sedum or grass) for natural isolation. From the beginning we looked into building the house in a traditional style: red with white windows, but our love for simplicity and design made us decide on a modern log home instead.

Here is some pictures of houses that inspired us (found on Pinterest) and that lead to the design of our own house. See OUR finished design further below:

THE FINISHED DESIGN:

We really liked the idea of a modern barn, a square box, with low angled roof that enabled us to have a grass on it. With three children and in need of one artist studio each, we started drawing:

- 4 bedrooms

- guest room/ movie-room

- kitchen

- 1 living room

- 2 studios

- laundry room

-1 Japanese style bathroom

- storage room

- garage

- library/ study room

- shower room

- dirt entrance

- nice entrance

Other features we needed for living sustainable:

- fireplace

- open ceiling and big windows to let the sun into the house

- built in green house to the south for growing food all year around

- low energy FTX ventilation (recycled heat system)

- solar panels for energy self sufficiency

- low energy household machines

- geothermal heat

- our own water

- green roof to save on isolation and for a roof that takes care of itself.

Max used Sketch-up and came up with the following design for our house. We decided to wait with both solar panels and the built in green house for budget reasons. We designed the house to be able to build the green house along half of the south side later on. We also decided to save money on the inside walls and build the house on pillars, saving on inside log walls. This will give us an interesting contrast between log outer walls and plain walls as well as pillar details embedded in the walls and pillars in the living spaces.

For the inside, we wanted a rather industrial and simple feel: matte grey cement floors, white walls in combination with wood details, showing pillar structures in the living room, a hidden stair case, lots of light from big windows.

Here is some more Pinterest inspiration for the interior: