Tag: Home Design

The latest in Swamplot’s roundup of entries to the $99K House Competition: This home from Steve Pribyl of dbaArchitects in Los Angeles:

This design is for a relatively modest 1400 s.f. house that utilizes innovative techniques to create an energy-efficient residence. An ecologically friendly house will use minimal natural resources over the life of the house.

A high surface-to-volume ratio is desirable in order to use a minimal amount of raw materials during construction. A sphere is the most efficient shape to meet this criteria, but it isnâ€™t practical in terms of existing timber framing technology. An octagon is the closest reasonable approximation of a sphere using tried and true construction materials and methods.

77026, 99K House Competition, Air Conditioning, Design Competitions, Fifth Ward, Green Design, Home Design

Home Design

12/05/08 11:00am

Holiday Heat

Homebuying, Quicklink, Real Estate Marketing, Utilities

HOLIDAY HEAT “Fireplaces in Houston are kind of like spleens or tonsils; probably used to be necessary, but really just for decoration now, until they flare up and cause a problem, or allow racoons, birds and rats unfettered access to your living room. Along with all the other picturesque images of family life I gleaned from Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney, I always envisioned my home with a fireplace. The only trouble is, Drew makes so much of his own heat that he can barely stand to be near himself without sweating. Iâ€™m always moments from losing a limb to frostbite, so itâ€™s difficult for us to agree on a mutually comfortable temperature. But, as you can tell, the fireplace is lit in this photo, so we must be learning to compromise. Indeed. All I have to do to make Drew thrilled to sit in front of a lit fire in December is turn on the fan. And the air conditioner.” [A Peine for Your Thoughts]

Air Conditioning, Fireplaces, Home Design, Homebuying, Interiors, Real Estate Marketing, Utilities

Construction Materials

12/04/08 5:05pm

$99K House Series: SoyBeam House

Fifth Ward, Green Design and Development, Home Design

Next up in our $99K House Competition review: An innovative entry from Nick Gillock and Emil Mertzel of Lookinglass Architecture + Design in L.A.:

This project for an affordable, sustainable and energy efficient new 1264 square-foot home combines some conventional home-building techniques – such as below-grade utilities, an insulated concrete floor slab, concrete curbs and framed wall assemblies with pre-engineered shear panels – with an entirely new building component known as the SoyBeamâ„¢.

77026, 99K House Competition, Construction Materials, Design Competitions, Fifth Ward, Green Design, Home Design

Construction Materials

12/03/08 11:11am

$99K House Series: The Rippling House

Fifth Ward, Green Design and Development, Home Design

5 Comments

Today’s featured entry to the $99K House Competition comes from Luca Donner and Francesca Sorcinelli of Donner & Sorcinelli Architetti in Silea — near Venice, Italy. It’s called the “Rippling House.”

The idea was to give people a home that could be built cheaply, using simple technologies, suitable for self-construction, and where they can have optimal comfort. These are the issues our studio focuses on: everyday problems. We believe that a good project should not necessarily cost more. You can give convincing answers even with limited budgets, and this project is an example.

77026, 99K House Competition, Construction Materials, Design Competitions, Fifth Ward, Green Design, Home Design

Construction Materials

12/01/08 3:55pm

$99K House Series: The Shell System

Fifth Ward, Green Design and Development, Home Design

Digsau, an architecture firm out of Philly, worked with Oldcastle Precast to come up with this $99K house entry, which uses some concrete technology more commonly encountered in Houston area civil structures:

A concrete module serves as the building block for the system, and its combination with other modules allows the structure to respond to specificities of climate, site, and individual preference. The system thus proves highly adaptable as an infill structure on vacant properties in an urban context and allowing for a diversity of exterior space in new developments.

77026, 99K House Competition, Construction Materials, Design Competitions, Fifth Ward, Green Design, Home Design, Precast Concrete

Fifth Ward

11/26/08 11:03am

$99K House Series: Good for Houston

9 Comments

Houston architect Carl Brunsting calls his $99K House Competition entry “A Good House.” He says his

intent was to make an affordable house FOR HOUSTON, that emphasis meaning that the design was about having a sloped roof with overhangs to deal with our sun and 56 inches of rain, but without becoming something like a builderâ€™s pastiche. It is built up off the ground like an old bungalow to keep it dry from flooding and up for privacy from the street and to avoid long-term problems with Houstonâ€™s expansive gumbo soil. It has a front porch for a lot of obvious reasons, and the overhangs all around mean that windows and doors wonâ€™t leak and you can open a window when itâ€™s raining.

77026, 99K House Competition, Design Competitions, Fifth Ward, Green Design, Home Design

Fifth Ward

11/25/08 5:56pm

$99K House Series: The ShotFrame

4 Comments

An eco-minded Houston home for only $99K? Here’s a shot at it . . . all the way from Muncie, Indiana. Michael Gibson, who teaches at Ball State’s College of Architecture and Planning there and is also a research fellow at the university’s Institute for Digital Fabrication, sent in this design:

The ShotFrame House is an updated version of the traditional â€œshotgunâ€ house that is frequently seen in Houston and other areas of the southern US. Shotgun houses are characterized by a series of simple rooms, lined up perfectly on a lot from front to back: providing the advantages of a small, inexpensive footprint which can be easily framed. The ShotFrame House uses a similarly aligned series of views, but improves the shotgun-style building by employing a prefabricated, computer-designed and manufactured framing system. This framing system allows the rooms . . . to expand at points along the length of the house, allowing daylight to penetrate the middle rooms.

77026, 99K House Competition, Design Competitions, Fifth Ward, Green Design, Home Design

Fifth Ward

11/24/08 4:46pm

$99K House Competition: The Series

No Comments

One day before an exhibition of design-competition entries at the Architecture Center Houston Downtown closed last month, the Rice Design Alliance and the Houston chapter of the AIA held a groundbreaking ceremony at 4015 Jewel St. in the Fifth Ward. The winning entry of the $99K House Competition, designed by Seattle architecture firm Hybrid/ORA, will be built on that site by contractor D.H. Harvey and sold or auctioned through the Tejano Community Center.

The competition, held early this year, was meant to produce a prototype for “sustainable, affordable” homes of 1,400 sq. ft. or less that could be built on lots made available through the city’s Land Assemblage Redevelopment Authority. The Jewel St. site was donated by LARA.

The exhibition featured 66 selected entries to the competition, out of a total of 184 submitted. Images of those entries are included in the exhibition catalog.

Swamplot featured one kudzu-wrapped competition entry back in February. Beginning tomorrow, we’ll feature a few other entries received in response to a general request for Swamplot-ready versions recently sent to the participant email list that was conveniently added to the competition website.

(Note to competition participants who somehow didn’t receive a request from us: If you’d like to send in your entry, please email Swamplot and we’ll send you a list of requirements.)

Update: Entries in this series are now on this page.

New kid on the block [Rice News]
Program/Budget [the 99K House Competition]
Land Assemblage Redevelopment Authority [City of Houston]
Building Cheaper with Kudzu: $99K House Competition Finalist [Swamplot]

Photo of 4015 Jewel St.: Jonathan LaRocca [license]

77026, 99K House Competition, Affordable Housing, Design Competitions, Fifth Ward, Green Design, Green Development, Home Design

Home Design

11/21/08 1:38pm

Palladian McMansions and You

Green Design and Development

Homebuilders, Quicklink

4 Comments

PALLADIAN MCMANSIONS AND YOU “The next time you feel the urge to lament how a freshly built stucco McMansion has replaced two cozy bungalows down the street, consider this: You may be at the intersection where old meets new and bearing witness, as generations past have, to a longstanding battle of urban and rural ideals. At least, that’s one part of the equation, according to University of Houston assistant professor Michelangelo Sabatino. . . . ‘In the suburbs, homeowners aspire to show off verdant lawns as symbols of success. The lawn recalls the agrarian past of the country,’ he says. ‘And yet, if one looks closer, it is more of a simulacrum â€“ just a representation â€“ of this past. Few really want to actually grow vegetables, and few, especially in Texas, seem to want to hang out on the lawn or on porches, preferring the cool of their air-conditioned homes.’ . . . The paradox of todayâ€™s McMansion craze â€“ many of them inspired by Palladian motifs, such as symmetry and classical ornament on their facades â€“ is that they donâ€™t reflect the values that originally inspired them, Sabatino says. In a way, this underscores that history is never stagnant, he says, yet it also illustrates that the builders and buyers arenâ€™t really aware of what values inspired [Andrea] Palladioâ€™s architecture. ‘In some cases, Palladioâ€™s legacy has been reduced to mere “style.â€’â€ [dBusiness News]

Andrea Palladio, Home Design, Homebuilders, McMansions

10/29/08 10:32am

Big and Green

Home Design, Houston Architects, Quicklink

Green Design, Home Design, Houston Architects

BIG AND GREEN Houston Architect Donna Kacmar rightsizes her client base: “What is our goal here? I once had a client interview me. She wanted to do a green house. I suggested they could combine some of their (rooms). She said, ‘Oh, no, I need 9,000 square feet; I just want it to be very green.’ (Kacmar laughs.) I didn’t get the job.” [Houston Chronicle]

Cypress

10/07/08 12:07pm

The Royce Home To End All Royce Homes

Home Decor, Home Design, Homebuilders, Homes for Sale, Interiors

27 Comments

16427 Telge Rd., Cypress, Texas

What’s this 15,811-sq.-ft. home in Cypress doing on the market . . . for a fat $9.8 million?

Looks like the seller might be needing to do a little downsizing!

77429, Cypress, Home Decor, Home Design, Homebuilders, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Royce Builders

Crime

09/10/08 9:39am

Gates of River Oaks Photo Tour

Home Design, River Oaks

2 Comments

Driveway Gate of a Home in River Oaks, Houston, Texas

Joni Webb takes Cote de Texas readers on a driving tour of River Oaks houses, and reports:

. . . slowly yet surely, River Oaks has become a gated community of sorts without anyone realizing it. Instead of the one set of gates leading into the neighborhood, house after house is located behind their own iron gates now. Until my latest drive through, I hadn’t realized how many houses were gated in what was once a more accessible neighborhood. In America, we tend to think of gated communities as being far away, out in the suburbs, a place where people take flight against a rising crime rate. But here, in River Oaks, in the heart of the city, in the shadow of our downtown, this community has chosen to hide themselves behind formidable walls, and thus, have changed the look and atmosphere of one of our treasures.

Selections from Webb’s “exclusive” photo collection:

77019, Crime, Gates, Home Design, River Oaks, Tours

Audubon Place

08/05/08 12:39pm

Piazza Townhomes: Fountain Below

Home Design, Homebuilders, Homes for Sale, Montrose, New Construction: Residential, Townhomes

7 Comments

Piazza Townhomes, 620-640 Harold St., Audubon Place, Houston

The planter cutouts next to the garage doors . . . the single-sided, shingled pediments . . . the cast-in-foam detailing . . . the security fence. Yes, it could only be another themed stucco townhouse compound in Montrose!

But the Piazza Townhomes, now under construction by Savannah Home Builders on Harold St. near Stanford in Audubon Place, will surely be unique! Consider: 4 stories. A garage-level wedding-cake-style central fountain, topped with . . . something that looks like a naked cherub. Above, an elevated second-floor courtyard, wrapped with wrought-iron-look railings and greened with potted topiary.

In the video below, it all blends together seamlessly, thanks to a languid easy-listening soundtrack. The project’s website puts it best: the Piazza Townhomes truly is “Architecture Imitating Art.”

77006, Audubon Place, Home Design, Homebuilders, Homes for Sale, Montrose, New Construction: Residential, Theming, Townhomes

Bellaire

07/01/08 12:31pm

Bellaire New Home Showcase Tour: Webb Edition

Home Design, Homes for Sale, New Construction: Residential

9 Comments

Joni Webb goes on a tear through Bellaire, describing some new builder homes:

Each year, Bellaire builders compete in a Showcase of Homes where they try to out build each other with more and better amenities, more square footage, more details, more windows – more of everything and anything to win the Best of Show. The builder is the star here, architects are rarely if ever mentioned. I don’t blame them, I wouldn’t want to claim one of these “show” houses myself. Is it truly harder to design an attractive house? Is it more difficult to design a home with inviting curb appeal? I don’t think so. I think it actually must be harder to design one of these detailed overloaded showcase style houses.

And then . . . she takes readers on a tour of Bellaire’s baddest spec homes! Here’s Swamplot’s edited version . . . actual addresses, details and asking prices, and links to the listings have been added (and some contrasting homes Webb likes much more have been left out):

4701A Braeburn Dr., Bellaire, Texas

Location: 4701 Braeburn Dr.
Details: 4-5 bedrooms, 4 1/2 baths; 5,076 sq. ft.
Price: $999,000
The Pitch: “Stunning Mediterranean stone and stucco new construction in Bellaire! . . . Virtual grass added to photo!”
Docent Comments: “Is it Mediterranean or French, contemporary or Tuscan? Take your pick, there are elements here of each style. The front loading garage is the focal point. Can someone please explain the two windows lowered on the stone at the front of the garage? Are they lowered for children or dogs to peer out of them? And why are there two faux windows on each side of them? I count FIVE lanterns on the garage alone. The house itself is barely noticeable, it’s so pushed to the back of the garage. The front door is encased in a square stone facade, again, why? Two turrets of different heights flank the front door. The stone work is placed with no regard to design. The left turret has a stone base, the right turret has a stone facade with bands of colored stucco at its base. The windows are contemporary, while the house is not. And why are there three faux windows with a small gable above the right turret on the second floor? There is nothing, absolutely nothing attractive about this house. If someone buys it, it will be a miracle.”

Oh, yes . . . there’s more!

77401, Bellaire, Home Design, Homes for Sale, New Construction: Residential, Tours

Boulevard Oaks

06/27/08 1:54pm

Wabi Sabi: Sold!