Green | Home Design Find

Home Design Find

For That Minimalist Interior: a Surfeit of Materialism

Sweden’s Michael Johansson takes all that (always originally much needed! useful! desirable!) stuff that has taken over our lives. Then he forcefully gets it under control, compacting it tightly into packed cubes of stuff, like his Rubik’s Kitchen, shown above. His work was shown at Copenhagen’s ‘Meaning of Void’ at Galleri Christoffer Egelund last month. [...]

Read more »
Benedictine Monastery Wins Highest LEED Platinum in USA

The Benedictine Women of Madison just received the highest rated LEED Platinum rating in the US (63 out of 69 possible points) for their new monastery, Holy Wisdom Monastery in Madison. It was almost 100% recycled out of the former monastery there. Nine tons of building material were donated to Habitat ReStore, 8,628.6 tons were [...]

Read more »
FSIGN’s Energy Breakthrough: Magic, Chic LED Lighting

By boldly embracing the inherent qualities of LED, and turning those into the feature, German design firm FSIGN has broken the “buy barrier” for truly energy efficient lighting with its new line shown at light+building this year. The low construction height of LEDs makes it possible to create lights that seem like magic, they are [...]

Read more »
A Shaker-Inspired Adjustable Peg Furniture System

A simple system designed by John Arndt and Wonhee Jeong from Oregon comprises assorted table tops and legs that can be assembled in a variety of ways to create different pieces of furniture. Their design firm Studio Gorm will show it at the Direktorenhaus art space in Berlin. The two Oregon designers are inspired by [...]

Read more »
‘Between Cathedrals’ Offers Eco Vision of Religious Architecture

Sited between two cathedrals in Cadiz is the sort of soaring serene space that usually is found only on private property. But this is public architecture. Albert Campo Baeza has succeeded in creating a modern vernacular for a new kind of cathedral design. As a public space, its marble floor is just sturdy, simple pavers. [...]

Read more »
Human-Scale Bridge Encourages Low Carbon Locomotion

New York studio WXY Architecture and Weidlinger Associates Consulting Engineers have designed a unique bridge for Xinjin in the Sichuan province in China. The two separated strands look almost like a Chinese character etched against the night. Indeed, the five oval rings formed by the lines of bridge decks are symbolic of the five rivers [...]

Read more »
Red Clay and Blue Solar Make a Powerful, Gorgeous Roof

Italy’s Area Industrie Ceramiche makes the Tegolasolare solar tiles that are cleverly designed to look every bit as traditional as antique clay tiles made in Tuscany. Providing clean electricity for people who object to the look of solar panels attached on top of a roof, this is a real aesthetic solution – looking as low-tech [...]

Read more »
Tiny Frugal Home is Designed to be Delightful

The L41 home is an ultra-compact 220 square foot, sustainable, high-design, high quality, energy-efficient house designed for a new greener generation of the newly frugal, epitomized by the author of the Tiny Life Blog who found it. Having seen their parents become “upside-down” in their mortgages, some young people are looking at a way to [...]

Read more »
A LED Lamp for the Two Billion with No Electricity

A number of companies are thinking about how to provide lighting to the two billion people on the planet who still have no electricity to read at night or do homework. In the third world, people rely on kerosene lamps and heavy fuel for lighting at night, but it damages the health of people breathing [...]

Read more »
Aldo Leopold Center Combines High, Low Tech to Save Energy

Low tech solutions yield about half of the energy savings in the first carbon-neutral LEED rated building in the US, the Aldo Leopold Foundation Center in Wisconsin. Built on PassiveHaus design principles, it uses 70% less energy than a typical 12,000 square foot building built simply to code. The center commemorates the life, beliefs and [...]

Read more »