Solar

Tiny Offices on Urban Roots Farm

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On a lot in back of a former motel, there is a farm. And on that farm there are some tiny offices…okay…I won’t sing “E-I-E-I-O”, but the structures being built on the Urban Roots Farm in Reno, Nev. are worth tooting a few horns about. Urban Roots is currently being created as an educational farm and community center where schools, children and families can learn about gardening, alternative building techniques and the natural areas of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Range. The farm sits on a 3/4 acre plot that was donated by Kelly Rae and Pam Haberman of HabeRae Homes (which the Tiny House Blog profiled a few years ago). Kelly and Pam also designed two tiny structures to be used as offices for the Urban Roots staff.

Kelly is unofficially calling the two building designs ModPods. She and Pam were inspired by some similar structures they came across while traveling by motorcycle on Orcas Island, Wash.

“I nearly went off the road on my bike when I saw these tiny houses,” Kelly said.

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Tiny SMART House

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Out of many of the world’s tiny homes, the Tiny SMART House has one of the nicest sleeping lofts I’ve ever seen. It’s open and airy with two windows and enough space to even put a few pieces of furniture. The 200 square foot Tiny SMART Houses are built in Albany, Oregon with quality materials and are finished with special details including French doors, wood floors and a tongue and groove ceiling. The homes are mobile and can be delivered to your building site.

The SMART House can be custom designed with several different styles and floor plans like the Oregon Trail and the Montana Cabin and exteriors such as cedar plank or Hardie Plank Lap. You can choose between several different doors, windows, wall styles and extras such as solar panels and a rain catchment system. Company owners Tor Barstad and Nathan Light designed the homes with college students in mind but have been requested to build their homes as guest houses and vacation homes.

The SMART House starts at about $57,250  for the base model and the upgrades for size, materials, design and bathrooms are extra.

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Mad Woman in the Forest

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Take a look at that window. That glorious window was the catalyst for the design of Laurie Halse Anderson’s cottage in the forest. Laurie is the author of several young adult books and historical thrillers and she writes in a small cottage in the forest. She expressed her need for a “room of her own in which to write fiction”, and her video from 2009 recounts the conception and building of her writing cottage. It was built over the course of a year by her carpenter husband and several of his friends. Laurie and her family wanted it to be off-grid, made with reclaimed materials and easy on the environment.

That amazing window (which Laurie called “a magic window”) was found lying up against a barn and turned out to be a church window from the 1800s. Custom glass was made for each round section of the window. She and her husband also perused the salvage yard and found old growth pine boards to use for the floor and chimney pots for the roof. Soybean based foam insulation was sprayed into the walls and the roof is Vermont slate. The house is powered by wind and solar.

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Ellen’s Tiny House

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Ellen Dawson-Witt was recently featured in her local newspaper because of her tiny house and her downshifted life. Ellen’s 192 square foot house is located on her property in Yellow Springs, Ohio where she grows some of her own food and carries water from a well for washing, uses solar panels for a lamp, CD player and laptop and uses a composting toilet. She does her cooking on a gas range from 1934.

Dawson-Witt, a freelance editor and government contractor, has avoided television and fashion and wanted to live her life like that of Henry David Thoreau.

“I wanted to live deliberately and to not be on automatic pilot,” she said. “I wanted to be connected to the elements.”

However, she is not able to live in her tiny house full-time. The county in which the home is located does not allow full-time living in a home without indoor plumbing. She keeps another house close to her work.

Inside the tiny house, there are three chairs, one table, one desk, a kitchen cabinet from the 1920s, one bookcase, a loft with one bed and one small chest that contains an extra blanket. About 75 percent of all she owns fits in the tiny house. (Ironically, she has a whole shelf of books on voluntary simplicity, she said.) She has her clothes and a file drawer in her other house and her tools and camping gear in a nearby shed.

Dawson-Witt will be leading a seven-week discussion on sustainability at her tiny house. The sessions started on October 4, 2011. Her talks will cover simplicity, ecology, food, money and more for those who want to live more lightly on the earth.

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Fab Lab House

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A house designed to act like a tree has recently won the Solar Decathlon Europe people’s choice award. The Fab Lab House, created by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) was visited by over 20,000 people during the event in Madrid, Spain. The Fab Lab House uses the sun, water and wind to create a micro climate that passively optimizes the basic conditions of habitability within the home.

The house was designed to act like a tree that captures energy with its solar “leaves” and sends it down to its roots, where is stored, shared, or returned to the house to produce the fruit of electricity. The house contains a “domestic metabolism” that provides a detailed real-time monitoring of its behavior and its interaction with the environment, creating historical profiles and sharing them socially.

The design of the Fab Lab house has been compared to both a boat and a peanut and has been called a “cinnamon submarine,” “forest zeppelin” and a “whale belly”. The house has also introduced significant technological innovations such as the world’s most efficient flexible solar panels, made with both Spanish and American technology. The project involved architects and experts from 20 countries as well as experts from MIT.

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Jacksonville Tiny House

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Marc and Trudi Boese and their bright yellow 115 square foot house were recently featured in a video and an article in the Florida Times-Union. Their decision to live more lightly on the land was influenced by a trip they took around the U.S. in 2009 in a biodiesel car and a handmade trailer. They are also living smaller for their new baby daughter, who is due in August.

The couple built the house on wheels on an acre of land in Florida that also houses several chickens and their vegetable and fruit garden. The house contains a small kitchen with a sink, microwave and fold down table, a bathroom with a shower and toilet, a small TV room with a couch, and a sleeping loft. The baby’s crib will be placed in the kitchen next to the dining table. They also have a workshop for tools and a prefabricated shed for some boxes of clothes and books. The TV, refrigerator, water pumps, air-conditioner and LED lights are powered by solar panels.

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Cargotecture by HyBrid Architecture

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Sunset Magazine’s Celebration Weekend in Menlo Park, Calif. was held at the beginning of June, and one of the stars of the show was the cargotecture c-series Sunset Idea House by HyBrid Architecture. The c-series represents a group of pre-designed, factory built units made from recycled cargo containers that can be combined or customized as desired by the owner.

Hybrid coined the term cargotecture to describe any structure built partially or entirely from recycled cargo containers. The c-series consists of five models ranging in price from $29,500 to $189,500. The home featured at the Sunset show was the c192 nomad which costs $59,500.

The prices of the c-series include:

  • Recycled ISO cargo container with new paint
  • Soy based spray foam insulation
  • Aluminum clad wood windows and doors (one 10 feet long opening and one side door)
  • Bamboo finish floor
  • 5/8 inch drywall ceiling and walls
  • Panelized wet room bath with redwood decking.
  • Duravit bath fixtures
  • IKEA cabinets and kitchen fixtures and lighting
  • Summit appliances
  • 30 gallon electric water heater (gas if available on site)
  • Convectair Apero heat
  • Factory plans, State L&I permits and inspections

Green and off-grid options are offered including solar panels, composting toilets and “green machine” sewage treatment and roofwater harvesting.

All the models are insulated about 15 percent above IBC and UBC building codes in the floors, walls and roofs. The building can be placed in cold climates as well as moderate to hot climates. The recycled plastic and soy sprayed-in insulation creates R24 walls, R44 ceilings, and R32 floors. The roofs can handle 60psf snow loads.

The HyBrid homes are shipped complete. A local contractor will need to be arranged for electrical and sewage hook-ups as well as foundation work. In many jurisdictions, if your project is less than 200sf there is no permitting process required. HyBrid has completed residential and commercial cargotecture projects in California, Oregon and Washington and has designed over 20 projects on 5 continents. They will ship their cargotecture homes worldwide.

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LEAP Adaptive Hummingbird

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LEAP Adaptive sells modern, green home plans online and they have recently designed their smallest home plan and are making it available to owners, contractors and architects. The Hummingbird is a 480-square-foot home that is energy efficient and utilizes a passive photovoltaic framework, low-VOC materials and the latest in green technology.

False Bay Cabin

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This little, modern cabin – located in the San Juan Islands in Washington – is  a private retreat for the owners and their guests. I think it would make a great tiny house that can be battened down from the elements and when you are gone for a few days.

The cabin was designed and built by Olson Kundig Architects, the designers of the Rolling Huts. Three sides of the cabin have custom-designed Shutter-Decks, designed in collaboration with Turner Exhibits. The Shutter-Decks lower to become an outdoor living space and rise to provide privacy for the occupants and to secure the cabin when it is unoccupied. The south Shutter-Deck can be opened independently of the other two, while an interior fireplace can be rotated 180 degrees to be enjoyed from the exterior.

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Shelter House

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While this eco-friendly and beautiful home is not really tiny, elements of the interesting “wing” design can be taken into consideration for a tiny house design. The Shelter House by Franklin Azzi Architecture is located in Yport, near Normandy, France. The two expansions which protrude on opposite sides of the house, resemble wings with covered patios and rooftop terraces.

This modern, sustainable home is constructed mainly of wood with a rustic masonry face, and features a rainwater-recycling system, geothermal energy, and solar panels that keep this house off the grid. The building materials are recyclable and locally sourced from within 100 km of the home’s location, and then assembled on-site. Vegetable fibers are used for walls and insulation, heating comes via wood-burning stove, and cooling and ventilation are passive. In addition, all the equipment providing hot water facilities have been placed outside the home, in a gallery 30 meters long, which is dug into the hillside. A final system supplies the toilets from the recovery of rainwater, stored in a 200 liter underground tank.

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The E.D.G.E

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This tiny prefab home is an experiment in all things efficient. The E.D.G.E., designed and built by by Bill Yudchitz and Revelations Architects/Builders Corp. in Wisconsin, stands for an Experimental Dwelling for a Greener Environment, and recently won  a design award from the American Institute of Architects-Wisconsin.

Several details of this design make it unique to other prefab designs. The “kinetic facade” rain screen, which consists of tall louvered panels, can be closed over the passive solar windows to insulate the interior and protect the E.D.G.E. when unoccupied. It contains two lofts with full staircases, and the furniture is custom made for the house and is multi-functional. In fact, the dining room furniture transforms into a bed.

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