Passive House Retreat

Passive House Retreat, New England by ZED:

"This private retreat and vacation residence located in a beautiful community on the New England coast features high performance and efficient use of space in a small package. The client sought a two bedroom, two bath home that was right sized for their family - nothing more, nothing less.  They also had a goal of minimizing the home's energy use.

PASSIVE HOUSE

A sleek, simple, gable roofed structure was designed and proposed with the Passive House standard, which is a building performance standard that yields an extremely low-energy home. A combination of exceptional insulation, air sealing, high performance windows, and solar gain reduces the space conditioning requirements to a mere fraction of a typical home, and uses only a very small heating system. The clients, whose extended families owned large, drafty, energy inefficient homes, immediately latched onto the Passive House standard for both the energy savings and the increased comfort.  They looked forward to a space with no wintertime drafts and very constant temperature throughout the home.

AESTHETICS

The gable form the home was planned as the defining aesthetic feature. Its iconic shape and playful red color is carried from the eastern exterior red gable, through to the interior kitchen wall, to the living space, and back outside to the opposite western exterior gable end. Inside, a clean fresh look is achieved with minimal trim, simple polished concrete floors, and careful glazing selection.

FLOOR PLAN

The layout was designed around the client's planned use.  The bedrooms are located at either end of the home and receive either morning or afternoon light.  The open floor plan of the living and dining space features a dining nook that bumps out of the southern side of the space.  Since family and friends often visit, the nook is large enough to sit the family and all their guests. The client also expressed their love of baths.  This was addressed by including a dedicated sun-filled tub room in the southeast corner of the home adjacent to the master bath.

Despite the modest footprint, the home addresses all of the client's needs using efficient space planning, plus features storage space and a loft area above.  With a ladder leading up, the loft provides the children with their own private place to spend time away from the adults.

PERFORMANCE

The generous amount of south-facing windows maximize solar heat gain in the winter, using the polished concrete floor to absorb the heat and re-radiate it into the space. The north-facing high performance glass door opens up to the agrarian view out over abutting farm lands, seamlessly connecting the interior living space with the exterior patio.

High R-values in the home, including true R-40 walls, R-50 slab, R-60 roof, U-Value: 0.13 windows, and exceptional air sealing mean that only about one-tenth of the energy is needed for heating when compared to the requirements of a conventionally constructed home. In addition to the very small heating system, the house also incorporates a heat recovery ventilator to maintain excellent indoor air quality with minimal energy expense."

 

 

Green Zero by Daniele Menichini:

"NATURALMENTE CHIC Ospitalità diffusa is the all-Italian concept which is gaining more and more attention within the ultimate frontiers of the hospitality industry: it mainly revolves around the revamping of existing buildings peppered across the countryside or located in small villages. A concept which has long been conceived differently by other countries. This new interpretation is right where the project GREEN_ZERO has its roots: a new modular housing devoted to the accommodation sector; a suite entrenched in a sustainable shell to be installed in the woods, at seaside, in the heart of the countryside, or wherever the landscape permits. For their own nature, the GREEN_ZERO shell and its content are synergy committed to the concept of environment-friendly buildings, and at the same time, they also represent a unique feature of the context in which they are placed. Perfect integration arises between the hosting landscape and the inner nature of the constructions, always with a touch of elegance for they be naturally chic, just as their name NATURALMENTE CHIC suggests. A new form of accommodation which guests can perceive as an educational game where grasping the opportunity to discover the very secret elements of green living, without giving up on the comfort and the emotional side of a holiday. An experience which makes guests appreciate how all the aspects of sustainable building maximize the exploitation of the environment energies and resources. The project’s objective is giving rise to a new hotel accommodation system that is tightly interwoven with its environment and leads to the quality improvement of the global tourism offer through the combination of different modular solutions, from bungalows with bathroom to two-room apartments. GREEN_ZERO represents the result of the co-operation of companies sharing the same green DNA, which is indeed the real value added at the basis of the development and implementation of the whole concept.

THE GREEN_ZERO SHELL The overall design of the module represents one of its distinctive traits, further highlighted by the element marking its perimeter. The module is conceived as a flat surface bending to form a C — sewn on one side with thin metal threads — which enables the project to naturally develop inside the shell. The GREEN_ZERO module is a prefabricated architectural system, in which the structural shell is made entirely from wood; it is provided with a frame and its stratigraphic, of both horizontal and vertical parts, is characterized by load-bearing and insulating elements, which allow the passage of installations, and the presence of an air chamber, created to obtain a specific assembly in accordance with climate conditions and thus being awarded the classification KlimaHaus A or KlimaHaus Gold. The cladding outer surface integrates a new thin photovoltaic panel system, which allows to supply the entire installation complex with the electrical power necessary to its functioning. The zinc-titanium membrane applied to this type of panel proves highly malleable and thus allows to perfectly fit the curved surfaces of the module and create all the technical elements fundamental to ventilation, management or recovery of rainwater. The prefabricated structure needs to be anchored to the ground on a natural stone foundation, that is a system composed of split-face stones of different grain size, compacted and retained by a metallic cage in order to achieve the ideal mechanical resistance. The external cladding is realized using a modular pattern of wooden boards, thus permitting to hide the fixing screws; its surface is polished with a natural wax coating, that can be regularly renewed, unless wood aging and oxidation are preferred. The structural architecture is completed, on one side, with iron tubes symbolizing a tangle of trunks: two are the pillars, two are the downspouts for channeling and recovering rainwater and the others have a mere aesthetic purpose. Flooring and internal and external cladding are made of highly resistant fully-vitrified ceramics, provided with outdoor anti-slipping surface. They are produced through sustainable processes conferring a wood and nature-like effect with patterns of extraordinary dramatic result. The external lighting system features a twilight sensor and gives great visibility to the outdoor area and entrance, beyond providing a bottom-up light illuminating the tree, which is integral to the architecture. The building includes different areas, i.e., outdoor, bedroom, and bathroom, and a mechanical room to accommodate all installations. The end of the module, where the curved surfaces are, is intended to accommodate tanks and equipment for rainwater recovery and management of incoming and outgoing water. GREEN_ZERO is a dynamic and customizable system able to meet every client’s need, keeping however intact its building and functioning principles.

THE NATURALMENTE CHIC SUITE Minimal and pure lines blend with a hint of color creating the basis for the bedroom area of the Naturalmente Chic suite. The space devoted to resting is immediately visible when entering the room: on one side, the bed headboard enriched by stylized branches and trunks, and on the other, a fully-glazed partition liaising the inside with the nature outside. The wardrobe unit with desk combines extremely functional open vertical and horizontal elements. The bed unit is designed to improve physical well-being thanks to its base with an independent and movable frame, which can be adjusted at different heights and positions to meet every requirements and match individual posture. The wide window is provided with a double layer of curtains: the first is translucent and soft for smoothing out the linear forms of the inside and giving some protection from the outside; the second is a roll-down curtain able to obscure light, suitable at night or for privacy reasons. The space enhances thanks to the ambiance created by various lighting sources: from wall-wash lights, highlighting the bed headboard, to the ceramic lamps on the bedside drawers, and from the ceiling lights, also made in ceramic and creating a back-illumination effect in relation to the wide window, to the table lamp on the writing desk and the floor reading lamp. Thanks to the designer armchair and ottoman — both included in the Bon Bon collection — breakfast can be served inside the room, enjoying a view on the surrounding nature. The bathroom area is distinguished by an architectural indentation that cuts the shell’s structure to embrace a pre-existing birch, thus becoming an integral and impressive part of the interiors. The cladding in fully-vitrified ceramics reproduces a carpet of fallen leaves in the woods and leads to the body wellness area: a large shower with wooden-slatted floor and rain system which offers intimate and relaxing moments, thanks to color therapy and strobe lights, ambiance perfumes and wall mirror with music technology. The outdoor area is designed for relaxing in harmony with the environment. It offers padded sofa-benches, where sitting or lying down, and a hi-tech table with lighting and music system for listening to music, reading or enjoying a drink, while being immersed in a natural scenario. The domotics system of the module allows, in few commands, to easily create customizable scenarios to be adapted to everyone’s needs by combining all different functions.

A SUSTAINABLE PROJECT “Contrary to today’s popular belief, green design is not a matter of fashion. It is instead a choice based on solid research, which involves structure, installations and materials, as well as the planning of spaces and, last but not least, the design of the objects within them. A research which selects mass or customized items, exclusively certified:” these are the principles inspiring our integrated project team, whose goal is to develop projects moving towards a zero-impact on the environment. Our responsibility towards the environment is in fact the leitmotif of the whole project, which blends the modular architecture of Green-Zero with the interior design of Naturalmente Chic: a double reference to both the “invisible project” and the “visible project”, meaning the building in its entirety, including the foundation and structural system, all installations and the use of local natural resources, as well as all finishing elements, lighting, furnishing and furniture, without forgetting the selection of suppliers and installers which have to ensure the highest possible standard of sustainability. In particular, the project’s sustainability comes in the foreground in several elements, such as the photovoltaic cells covering the outside surface of the shell and the use of water pumps with a maximum capacity of five liters per minute. All the rest is hidden underneath the “skin” of the shell, finally becoming its beating heart. The success of this sustainable project depends on the synergy among well-educated costumers, integrated planning processes, budget maximization, project management and companies’ selection, all oriented towards the creation of a system which strives to be entirely sustainable, also in economic terms."