Builder Concept Home 2010: A Home for the New Economy
NEW FOUNDATION: The Concept Home offers a more buildable and sustainable model for reviving the housing industry. The finished virtual house will be open for online tours on Jan. 19, 2010
If you’ve never taken a personal, pri-vate tour of a national show home, the 2010 Builder Concept Home is your chance. Presented exclusively online as a photo-realistic virtual experience, the Home for the New Economy affords builders the opportunity to walk through an adaptable, sustainable, livable, and buildable 1,700-square-foot house from the comfort and convenience of their own desktop.
“Our goal this year is to respect and reflect what’s going on in the industry right now and present what we believe is the model for the future,” says Builder’s editorial director Boyce Thompson.
One of several New Economy Homes created by Miami designer Marianne Cusato (of Katrina Cottage renown), the two-story house strips away the gratuitous trimmings and trappings of the McMansion era—things such as tacked-on porches, masonry façades, and palatial master suites—and returns the house, its floor plan, and its finishes back to a human scale. “McMansions promised a better life, but they didn’t deliver,” says Cusato. “We need to get back to basics and create comfortable, livable housing that’s sustainable.”
To define “sustainable,” Cusato goes beyond reducing a home’s carbon footprint with a concept for housing that serves the owners’ needs from first-time buyer to empty-nester—a distinct paradigm shift from the recent past. “Whenever people experienced a major lifestyle change, such as a child or an at-home business, they had to move because the house didn’t suit them anymore,” she says. “This house adapts to whatever your personal economy happens to be.”
Cusato also engaged building scientist Mark LaLiberte to add his perspective on the subject of sustainability. Minneapolis-based Room & Board served as the interior designer and furnishings supplier, while Christian Wagley of Alys Beach, Fla., designed the landscape plan.
Of course, opening a concept house as an exclusively virtual experience presents its own shift for a legacy of Builder-sponsored show homes that date back to 1998. “The wealth of content we can provide online in a 24/7 context is far more than any sticks-and-bricks show home,” says Thompson.
The Builder Concept Home 2010: A Home for the New Economy will open for virtual tours beginning Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010, the opening day of IBS, and remain open through June. Builder will feature the home in its January 2010 issue, and the house will be the focus of the Hanley Wood booth (#C2128) at IBS 2010.
The New American Home 2010
WORK IN PROGRESS: A rendering of the finished home reveals a desert contemporary style perfectly suited to the Las Vegas climate and the home's infill location.
Credit: RM Design Studio
By the time you read this, Las Vegas builder Adam Knecht of Domanico Custom Homes may indeed have found the $1.8 million he needed to finish The New American Home 2010 for the upcoming IBS. But as of early November, the nearly 6,200-square-foot, desert contemporary house remained only 75 percent finished and eerily quiet as subcontractors waited for Knecht to secure financing and get the project moving again.
It’s a shame, too. Big and beautiful, well-appointed and well-suited within an infill enclave of seven other like-sized luxury homes, the house was on its way to achieving some remarkable performance thresholds (including a preliminary estimate of 47 percent whole-house energy savings compared to the Building America benchmark) and a Platinum rating from the NAHB’s Green Building Program.
Using 10-inch-thick insulated concrete forms as its primary structural system and advanced framing materials and methods for the rest of the shell, a comprehensive insulation package that optimizes different technologies for their most-appropriate applications, and a dedicated effort to divert construction waste away from the landfill—among several other examples—The New American Home 2010 presents what it has since the program’s inception in 1984: leading-edge ideas and solutions that builders can readily apply to their own projects.
Should financing not come through in time, the NAHB is considering several options to present the unfinished house to IBS attendees, including a virtual presentation using photo-realistic renderings of the completed house. “We are weighing how best to continue the program and serve all interests under these unusual circumstances,” says Tucker Bernard, executive director of the National Council of the Housing Industry—The Leading Suppliers of NAHB, which cosponsors the annual project with Builder.
WORK IN PROGRESS: As of late October, plastic and thin-foam sheeting protected cabinets, appliances, and other finishes that had been appllied before work essentially ceased.
Credit: Rich Binsacca
KTGY Group of Irvine, Calif., designed the stucco-and-stone–sided house. It features five bedroom suites (including a guest suite on the ground level), a grand, open foyer with accordion-fold doors to a courtyard and pool area beyond, corner-connecting, telescoping sliding glass doors flanking the family room’s stone-faced fireplace wall, and an upstairs “man cave” with a private balcony.
A zero-edge swimming pool is part of an overall outdoor experience that includes a contemplative garden and an extensive covered outdoor kitchen and bar area—an oasis in the heart of an established infill neighborhood only a few blocks west of The Strip. Summers/Murphy & Partners of Dana Point, Calif., created the desert-themed (and drought-tolerant) landscape design.
Tours of the house during IBS 2010 are unlikely and to date unscheduled. Check www.buildersshow.com for updates as the opening of the annual trade show on Jan. 19 approaches.