Green Design Guide – Habitat for Humanity’s First LEED Platinum Home

This week we’re traveling to Southern California to tour the first LEED Platinum home built by Habitat for Humanity. The local mayor calls it the greenest home in Riverside, the desert community where I grew up. Very exciting indeed that a home built to be affordable for low-income families can also attain the highest sustainable home rating offered by the US Green Building Council (USGBC).

Jon Dougal, Sustainability Director for Habitat for Humanity, leads our tour. You’ll hear from Jon about the many aspects of this home that earned point values towards LEED Platinum. I know the area well and especially like the way the home’s location on an in-town urban infill lot qualifies for LEED points based on close proximity to a park, shopping and even Metrolink, Southern California’s commuter rail system. That makes walking to local and regional services an option for the Suarez family while reducing their personal carbon footprint.

The home combines practical low-tech energy and water saving features well suited to the desert with state-of-the-art technology for its mechanical systems. I also like Jon’s description of linoleum, a product invented almost 150 years ago in England, and how it’s been rediscovered as a green product and used in the Habitat home. In particular, linoleum’s rapidly renewable “short term harvest ingredients”, linseed oil, wood flour and cork dust, are interesting to hear about. Click here to learn about Linoleumville, New York, at Wikipedia.

The attic and roof design are fascinating. The design uses a common whole house fan to optimize an evaporative cooling system for the house in combination with a solar panel system mounted on the garage.

So join Jon and other green experts in this Podcast to learn how a Habitat for Humanity home can be so energy efficient that it provides power back to the grid. Who knew that affordable housing could give back to the environment in such enriching ways. Click here to watch and learn!

Come back next week for another conversation, and share GreenDesignGuide with a friend. If you’d like to comment now or after watching the video, I’d appreciate your feedback. Please suggest ideas or topics you’d like to hear about. Thanks for reading, watching, and commenting… it’s all good.

Green Design Guide – What, a Sustainable Home Plan Collection?

This week we’ll explore the fist collection of home designs ever created to qualify for the two national green certification programs, NAHB National Green Building Standard and LEED for Homes.

I had the pleasure of collaborating on this project with Alan Mascord Design Associates, based in Portland, Oregon, and launching it at the International Builders’ Show. The Northwest has long been a hotbed of green activity and Alan and his team carved out a niche early on by producing green home designs for builders and consumers.

The book/CD/website can be accessed at www.mascordefficientliving.com. There you’ll find a collection of single and multi-family designs ranging from contemporary to traditional in style. All of the designs are available for purchase and include construction drawings as well as notes, detail sheets and information for building green. Think of it as a “how to” guide for building a sustainable home to comply with one of the national standards, but without an expensive consultant. Not that it’s a simple task, but with this plan collection, green home building is more accessible and affordable than ever.

One of my favorite aspects of the Mascord Efficient Living book/CD is our idea of including richer home plan content than has been available before. The kitchen and laundry rooms from 23 of the 54 home plans have been drawn using Google SketchUp for an interactive experience. The CD allows you can take a virtual tour within these rooms, explore cabinet color and finish options using SketchUp, and even try different appliance options by accessing the Google 3D Warehouse.

The website is free to explore and at $14.95, the hardback book with interactive CD is the deal of the year. Even if you don’t build a home using the book, the chapters on Location, Materials & Resources, Energy, Water, Air Quality and Landscaping contain a wealth of ideas for green living.

Come back next week for another conversation, and share GreenDesignGuide with a friend. If you’d like to comment, we appreciate your feedback. Please suggest ideas or topics you’d like to hear about. Thanks for reading, watching, and commenting… it’s all good.

Green Design Guide – Using SketchUp to Go Green

This week we’re taking a trip to the International Builder Show to learn how Google SketchUp, a free 3D-modeling program, can be used to design a green kitchen. If you’ve not tried it, SketchUp is easy to learn and growing quickly in popularity. Why? It’s a fast way to model your design ideas, the free version is very powerful, the professional version is only $495 and it’s available in several languages.

There are excellent video podcasts for learning the program at no cost. I especially like the SketchUp Show as an informative and entertaining series with over 50 episodes. Several shows travel to onsite locations where you’ll see sustainable design projects by industry leaders.

In episode #47, Mike Tadros, host of the SketchUp Show, demonstrates a tool in SketchUp called PhotoMatch as a way to speed your 3D design process using photos taken from a digital camera or cell phone. Of course I’m partial to this podcast because Mike incorporates one of my projects, the Sustainable Kitchen, a visionary project from Whirlpool Corporation, which I conceived and co-designed. Mike not only shares the Sustainable Kitchen, he shows how it can be morphed into a sustainable home design, the “Berkley”, a home by Alan Mascord Design Associates, a topic I’ll save for a future article. You’ll also catch a glimpse of the many 3D-model collections of green building products downloadable from the Google 3D Warehouse at no cost.

My interest in sharing affordable, open community, green design tools is deliberate. I hope these ideas help you embrace green design faster and get through the economic downturn a little easier. Now let’s travel to the International Builder Show and learn from Mike’s expertise in SketchUp and sustainable design. Enjoy the show. Click Here!

Come back next week for another conversation, and share GreenDesignGuide with a friend. If you’d like to comment now or after watching the video, we’d appreciate your feedback. Please suggest any ideas on topics you’d like to hear about. Thanks for reading, watching, and commenting… it’s all good.

GreenDesignGuide - Trend Analysis for Going Green

Let’s look at a new application from Google Labs where you can do trend analysis for free. Why? It’s a great way to analyze hot trends in sustainable design internationally, in the US, and even in major cities. The app is Google Trends. It’s based on Internet searches using Google, is quantifiable and reports up-to-the-hour trend results.

Here’s how it works. Try entering “green building” at www.google.com/trends, click on search, and results will pop up for the last five years. Refine your search for a specific date range (years, months, days) and geographic location to dig deeper. You can create trend lines for multiple search words simultaneously and the app overlays the results for easy comparison. For example, add “green remodeling”, “green products” and “green design” to your trend search and see what pops up. Now let’s analyze the chart we just created.


Google Trends looks back as far as 2004, exactly when “green building” met their minimum threshold for reporting. The term peaked in 2nd quarter of 2008. Since that time its search popularity has declined slightly. Is interest in the green movement waning? Not likely. Perhaps search for “green building” has reached a saturation point because it’s gone mainstream. It’s hard to determine the exact casual relationships without further research. But note that in 2005, “green design” became a popular and consistent search using Google. By 2006, “green products” became widely searched and continues to be popular. In contrast to the economic downturn, this increase in Internet search activity bodes well for the future of green design + building professionals. Note too that “green remodeling” hasn’t shown up yet in Google Trends. Maybe 2009 will be the year for “green remodeling” to emerge. “Remodel” and “remodeling” are already huge search terms.

There’s not much to report in GreenDesignGuide from watching hourly Google Trends. But it works great if you care about the career prospects of American Idol contestants. Just ask a “tweenager”.

Come back next week for another conversation, and share GreenDesignGuide with a friend. Thanks for reading, watching, and commenting… it’s all good.