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Seattle Project - Origins
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The idea of building a “green” home had been
floating around in our heads for a number of years, more as a realization of our
environmental beliefs and an interest in architecture than as a place to live.
Our motivation to build one for ourselves finally came from a desire to downsize
and a growing frustration with trying to make the spaces in our house fit our
evolving lifestyle, which now involved both us working at home most of the time.
Our current house, which was our first attempt at a green remodel, was
both too large and too expensive to be retrofitted to work for our new
lifestyle. In retrospect, we
realized it never was a good match for our lifestyle; we just never stopped to
assess it. Our initial search
concentrated at looking at houses that needed very little work in hopes we could
find something that would be “good enough”, but nothing jumped out and said
“buy me”. The ideas we had
learned from green building made all existing homes disappointing, but at the
time we couldn’t really qualify why. While contemplating whether we had the energy and
enthusiasm to undertake a time consuming and expensive remodeling project, there
were some basic things we didn’t want to compromise on. We wanted a sunny lot, a quite street
and an established neighborhood and
we didn’t want to move more than a few miles away. We wanted the things our current house
was lacking: work spaces for both
of us, better usage of the “public” spaces, solar orientation and an
attached apartment because we wanted someone there to take care of the house so
we could travel. There were also
things we had and didn’t want to give up: good daylighting, energy efficiency,
good indoor air quality, and a wonderful connection to the outdoors. Essentially, we’d
become very picky! Most houses are built to hold the requisite amount of space and fit on
the lot while not costing too much, with few other considerations given.
With every unsatisfactory house we saw, we were mentally were gearing up
for construction.
When the house next door to friends went up for
sale that was a reasonable remodel candidate (a 1948 box of about 900 sq. ft, we
decided construction was our fate, and we began to create a more detailed list
of what qualities we thought the ideal house should have – a process that
ultimately led us to surprising conclusions.
We began with a quick (and not particularly
thorough) search for what green homes had been built before, and quickly
discovered that many houses were built to emphasize a specific purpose: there are solar
homes, energy efficient homes, healthy homes,
homes that emphasize alternative building materials (either natural or
engineered) and homes that emphasized creating space that “felt good”.
While most homes considered all green building topics, not many focused
on a balanced approach, or what we call “how good can you be for an affordable
price”. In addition, we
couldn’t find examples that combined “green” with aesthetics and design
patterns that make a house “feel good”.
Clearly we would have to combine ideas from multiple sources to define
our guiding principles.
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Next: Design: Making decisions on paper
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