Practical Eco

Dreaming Green: Eco-Fabulous Homes Designed to Inspire

This new book by Lisa Sharkey offers real inspiration to anyone who yearns for a stylish green home. It demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that building green is no limitation to elegance or beauty. So, read it and drool. 

Dreaming Green features Sharkey's own Manhattan brownstone remodel and sixteen other residences from cities and suburbs to the countryside.

Click the image to get it on Amazon, or check our A-Store here.

Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing

Global Green USA has put out a new book titled, Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing. It's aimed at affordable housing managers, developers, architects and builders.  And it seeks to help them build affordable homes or modify existing ones for lower energy costs and healthier living. 

The book gives a wide variety of tips and best practices for green building on a small budget.

Tips from Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing include:

1. Install ENERGY STAR or pin-type fluorescent lighting and ENERGY STAR appliances
2. Design for natural ventilation and passive heating and cooling
3. Design for natural daylight
4. Use trees to shade elevations facing the east or west
5. Install light-colored or green roofs
6. Seal all plumbing and electrical penetrations
7. Install a timer delay or humidistat on the bathroom fan
8. Use low-water plumbing fixtures
9. Use recycled-content insulation, carpet, and drywall
10. Install a carbon monoxide detector

Find the book now on my AStore

Green Building for Dummies

The fabulous "For Dummies" series of books now includes one on Green Building to complement the Solar Power for Dummies that was already out. 

I only just learned of it though the wonderful Inhabitat site which carries an excellent write up on the book and the author Eric Corey Freed. Who, as it happens, is teaching at my alma mater, UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design.

The book is available on my Amazon Astore.

Making your square feet work harder

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about our general trend toward larger homes. Why do homes keep getting bigger? "McMansions" is a wonderfully appropriate term I've heard used. My guess, and it's not particularly researched, is that people see their peers buying larger homes and are sucked into "keeping up with the Joneses".  To some extent home builders are to blame for starting the trend and for not pushing back against demand for bigger homes by educating buyers or showing them how a well designed smaller home can deliver greater benefits. Whatever the reason, more and more builders are now starting to realize that investment in good design yields many tangible benefits including better value for money, part of which is appropriately right-sized homes.

In my idle web wandering I stumbled across this excellent article on Oikos Eighteen Design Principals to Make  Square Feet Work Harder, excerpted from the wonderful book The Art of Natural Building. If you don't already have the book, the article is a good read on its own.

My new book store on Amazon

I'll keep on writing about books I like or come across, but I've just set up my own 'store' on Amazon which basically just lets me compose my own selection of meaningful and useful items. 

Just for fun, I've included a selection of music too. My musical collection used to be something awesome when I had records and CDs - and my taste remains broadly ecclectic. Now it's all digital, so all I can say is the 60gig on my Ipod is barely enough now.  How does one manage two Ipods? I'll need to look into that one day.

Inside the Not So Big House

Sarah Susanka is doing everyone a service by highlighting the irrelevance of square footage as a measure of a home's worth. I'm tempted to say the stupidity of the modern obsession with a home's size.

Having lived in New York City apartments, or central London houses most of my adult life, I was shocked when I moved back to the US at how big homes have become here. What on Earth does a four person family need with 4,000 square feet or more?

Susanka rightly points out in her original work, The Not So Big House that it's not all about square footage, but rather good design, space utilization and adaptable spaces. 

Now in this new work she promises to expand on the message and by collaborating with design writer Marc Vassallo and visiting 23 houses where they illustrate how attention to detail rather than raw footage makes the real difference to you experience of a home.

This new book is due out on October 2nd, but you can pre-order your copy on Amazon now.

Timeless Way of Building

I was lucky enough to study architecture at UC Berkeley where Christopher Alexander teaches. Any while I was only there as an undergrad and he only taught grad courses, I was exposed to his work through other professors there.

Christopher Alexander's book The Timeless Way of Building is one of those books that changes the way you look at buildings, but also the whole process of design. It emphasizes a holistic view of design that is only now coming into vogue with the emergence of LEED methodology.

I see C.Alexander and the whole team involved with the development of A Pattern Language as the original 'Green' builders. They encouraged us to view design as something that involved and affected the whole community, the whole world. 

If you're the least bit interested in buildings, architecture, design then you must read this book. If you've already read it, read it again.

Green Remodelling

Another great book on Green building, or in this case remodelling.  I think there's a case for remodelling being greener than new build because it's recycling. Besides older homes tend to have more character, though you have to weigh that against the possibility that the building practices of the time were less energy efficient and may be less healthy. For instance, did they insulate or can you insulate now, or is there a vapor barrier under the foundation.

The Green House by Alanna Stang and Christopher Hawthorne

The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture, explores many of the different ways builders and architects have delivered sustainable homes. It features around 30 homes from all over the country, cities and rural, and serves as an inpiration for anyone interested in building green homes. It's well worth the $45 list price, but it's about 30% less expensive on Amazon if you follow the link.