< Previous page

The garden patio uses a bamboo privacy screen, but a permanent clothesline is incorporated into the design. That's just one small part of the energy efficiency -- the ability to hang clothes on a line instead of using an energy-sucking dryer. The house also incorporates radiant floor heating, which, as Kurtz pointed out, is not that expensive.

"Before you pour the slab of concrete, you just put down plastic tubing for the hot water to run through," he said. That will help the occupants save on heating bills.

A passive solar system will help with heating and cooling bills.

Six windows face south, ready to pick up the sun's warmth in the winter and transmit it to a heat-retaining brick wall inside the house. An overhang is positioned just so that it allows the sun's warmth in during the winter, but in the summer, when the sun is higher in the sky, the overhangs provide shade. Such a system is much cheaper than an active solar system that uses panels to collect energy for use in the rest of the house, Kurtz said.

Because of the severity of hurricanes in North Carolina, the team designated a bedroom as a safe room with double-strength walls where the family could go for shelter in the event of a storm.

The low cost of building supplies was achieved in part by going for off-the-shelf products, Kurtz said. The framing technique allows the builders to use locally grown southern yellow pine. And special joints called fingerjoints can be used to put small pieces of lumber together so that nothing goes to waste.

Outside, the house has a green screen of bamboo around the south side. On the southwest corner, an architectural trellis is designed to bear plants that will screen the sunlight in summer and allow it through in the winter.

The team also had to make sure the house fit in with the local neighborhood where Habitat hoped to build one, a modest neighborhood of ranches and bungalows on Terrell Road in Hillsborough. Habitat participated in designing the parameters for the contest, and the group also gets grant money for building energy-efficient homes.

The result was a design that the judges cited for its elegance and clean lines.

Different, but it fits

The house looks different from the usual Habitat for Humanity house, while still blending in with the neighborhood of bungalows in Hickory, said Mitzi Gellman, executive director of Catawba County's Habitat chapter.

"Our volunteers who come in and build these houses really enjoyed the challenge of building something different," she said.

Lanou noted that the house needed to look like a home, and with a front porch and gabled roof, it does.

"I am modernist," he said. "But if it doesn't evoke anybody's memory of what home is you can alienate people."

Working creatively with so many parameters to follow and so many personalities wasn't always easy.

"Collaborative design is not for the faint of heart, let's just say that," Kurtz said. "You can end up with your ego attached to the designs, yet in the real world that's not how it works. That was a huge education for us."

In the end, the group members were able to use one another --and their adviser, Lanou -- as sounding boards.

"People were able to go their strengths," said Kurtz. "I learned more and more about how to check my ego at the door and at the same time be true to the design process."

< Previous page