My very first guest post is from my friend Daniel Cunningham. Daniel has been involved in issues surrounding green building since he co-founded LivingHomes with Steve Glenn in 2003 where he oversaw construction of the first LEED Platinum home in the US. Since 2007 Cunningham has been heading up asset management for The Kor Group, a developer of hospitality and multi-family residential properties where he serves on the Sustainability Committee. Daniel currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife and two children, drives the obligatory Prius, and remains confused over paper vs. plastic.
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On September 5, the next LivingHome installation began in a neighborhood in Los Angeles just North of Sunset Boulevard known as Crestwood Hills. The house was built in partnership with Wired Magazine who helped secure some of the most cutting-edge home appliance/finishes/gadgets on the market that support the sustainable goals of the house.
The new house replaces an aging wreck that was deconstructed (rather than demolished) so that up to 75% of the building materials could be reused. Even at 4,057 sf the house is still designed to achieve at least a LEED Gold rating.
LivingHomes has listed a host of sustainable features including a 4-kilowatt SunPower solar power system, including high efficiency, all-black SunPower solar panels that generate up to 50 percent more power than conventional panels. The home will also feature a forced hot air radiant heating and cooling system; recycled glass bathroom countertops; Heath ceramic tile in the master bathroom; low-maintenance high-design ecological kitchen cabinetry by Valcucine; an environmentally friendly washer/dryer system by Bosch; water- efficient fixtures by TOTO; windows and doors constructed with recycled glass and aluminum by Fleetwood USA; reclaimed redwood exterior siding; tankless water heaters and LED light fixtures.
The house was installed over 2-3 days, with the first six modules comprising the first floor completed September 6 and the second floor modules installed September 7-8. Compared to the circus that surrounded the installation of the first home in Santa Monica, this installation went smoothly with a regiment of orange-clad traffic control and transportation company employees herding onlookers and local traffic beginning nearly at Sunset Boulevard. The tony Crestwood Hills area is more secluded than the model home on Highland Avenue and so there were fewer looky-loos than before although no less than three visitors from competitor Marmol Radziner managed to find their way there, cameras in hand.
This design, by preeminent architect Ray Kappe, is less glassy than their model home, but features the same handsome exterior wood siding (albeit different species) and Fleetwood fenestration that makes Ray’s LivingHomes designs so distinctive. This home is more of a hillside location with two jutting, cantilevered sections in the rear that wrap around an existing tree in the back of the property and an expansive deck on the second floor.
We’ll post the final list of technological goodies once the house is installed, but at the center will be a home automation system by Control 4 that ties into the lighting, heating and cooling system as well as the home theatre system. Also, in the next few posts, we’ll discuss in detail the green features of the house and how they led to the Gold rating as well as the prefabricated system LivingHomes used and how it lends itself to sustainable building.
Here is a link to some photos of Day 1 of the installation.
Thank you, Daniel. And I look forward to your next post!
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