Lafayette House

Green Award Winner - 2009 City of Lafayette Environmental Award of Excellence

This house was commissioned by the owner as a rebuild of a residence on their family homesite of fifteen years in the East Bay neighborhood of Lafayette. The existing 58 year old ranch house was disassembled and donated via the ReUse People.  A former energy engineer for PG&E, Gwenn was instrumental in setting a sustainability agenda for the project as a whole.

The program for a typical 3,000 square foot, four bedroom house set the quantitative constraints for the design. The west‐facing elongated private street frontage required sun protection for the front façade as well as sun exposure for the smaller southern face. The resultant form utilizes hinged shed forms opening to the south. Two shed roofs intersect over the main living space to form a valley roof that collects rainwater and also serve as a mounting platform for a net zero photovoltaic array. A solar chimney is built above an ethanol alcohol fireplace. Other materials of note are FSC wood framing, fly ash concrete, and no VOC paint. Cantilevered plywood roofs provide shade in summer, while perforated steel screens shade early afternoon sun from the west. The modest, one‐story, courtyard‐driven house slips into this neighborhood behind a row of mature sycamore trees.

In a local culture that continues to choose historic typologies to drive design, this simple house denies the norm in this architecturally conservative environment. Its materiality and form are direct responses to context, climate, and our current economy. It brings to light a more honest approach to the making of a house. Building codes in Contra Costa County are currently being rewritten to allow for this greywater reuse system.