Sustainable Architecture

The Village Home Foundation is building six straw-bale and cobb units around a central park-like courtyard, located downtown on Larch and Ella streets. The homes were featured in Sandpoint Magazine’s Winter ’13 issue. The cobb walls (a mix of clay, sand, and straw) offer an organic, beautiful, rodent-free, fire-resistant, thermal mass over the insulation and structure advantages of straw-bales.

VHF is also involved with the school/library project in Tuol Roka village, Cambodia, by Blueskies Development –with the idea that education is an important part of any long-term strategy for a sustainable culture.

A significant part of the Larch Street project is the courtyard. In the same way that education can foster sustainability, so can any social interaction. The lack of comfortable, quiet, public areas can easily translate into a diminished general education for everyone.

Sean is LEED certified, and we are committed to keeping up on the literature of the ever expanding field of environmental building science. Zero-Net homes, green roofs, solar technology, chemical-sensitivities, embedded energy calculations, and many other areas are seeing quick progress, as people put more attention to the concerns of the planet.

Reverend Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that ‘Beauty is the mark that God places on the virtuous.’ Health, beauty, and joy are related concepts. There does not need to be a conflict between living well and living sustainably.

Green roofs, heat exchanging systems including geothermal, passive thermal controls, net-zero homes– FKA follows the development of these technologies so that we can incorporate them in our designs, at levels as close to state-of-the-art as possible.