Parker and Stone recently built an environmentally friendly mansion in western Colorado (Steamboat Springs). The $5 million home has eco-friendly features such as ceilings made of Douglas fir timbers salvaged from a rail trestle that once spanned Great Salt Lake, recycled carpet, in-floor radiant heating, and of course nature.

This pricey vacation getaway is going to be featured in an upcoming edition of Architectural Digest. The only issue I have is that a home valued at $5 million has to be bigger than the average home, which by the way is not eco-friendly, BUT, if you’re going to go bling, at least it’s nice when you do use reclaimed supplies and energy efficient features like the South Park fellas.

Image via: Jennifer Chait – picture drawn by her eight-year-old son Cedar during his “I’m obsessed with South Park stage” (AND before you all slam me, no I don’t let him watch the very inappropriate episodes; thanks.)

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South Park Tree Huggers – Who Knew!?

This is not a commercial structure below though, it’s a really nice sustainable house, or more a compound I should say.

The Dar Residence has so many amazing features:

• The compound is split into 2 shifted bars, a studio building and main living space.
• The home looks large, but it’s just 1600 sq ft.
• The curved roof has daylight solar gain, and the house also supports passive solar gains, via a combined solar domestic hot water and space heating system fed by an array of evacuated tube collectors.
• Natural, durable materials—PISE (sprayed earth-cement), reclaimed redwood boards, and copper roofing were used as well as an extensive use of owner-found salvaged materials.

See more images including some very nice interior shots.

[images via Arkin Tilt Architects]

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Best Green Home of the Week

This lovely prefab is simple, small, and focused on outdoor-indoor living. It adds a smaller footprint than many homes, and can be totally customized and in most cases up and running in about 12 weeks. Not bad.

You know, about 3 years ago, I was not the biggest prefab fan; not even close. Now though, I’m sort of digging them. There are so many gorgeous styles out there now, and most with eco-friendly qualities too. I would even consider owning one I do believe. How’s that for progress? Maybe I’ll have to do a beautiful prefab line up post soon.

See interior shots of the iT House above.

Learn how to get your own iT House.

[images via Taalman Koch Architecture]

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Off-Grid iT House

Metropolis – one of the best magazines around, featured IslandWood in their January piece – Into the Woods. To give you a taste, here’s IslandWood’s version of a treehouse:

Stunning! To see more cool structures at IslandWood read the entire Into the Woods article, or visit IslandWood.

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Island Wood Structures

Back to my original post; yup enthralled I am. Drew Heath is a swinging architect from Australia but I can’t find much information on him. His website is minimal and his description fun stating, “Drew Heath is an architect who builds things!” (don’t know if he planted this but I like it). I did find some more info at Ace Day Jobs that says he started with a box of Legos and just moved on up in the world of building.

At Ace Day Jobs you can watch a really wonderful video of Heath discussing his career. Besides having very cool things to say he’s modest but driven noting that he’s won some small awards but that his contest motto is not to enter contests until he’ll win. Plus he’s not bad on the eyes — you know, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Of course the absolute best thing about Heath are his designs. Brilliant and many of them clean, simple, but with offbeat lines; a magic combination.

I may have first noticed Heath in an article reviewing his Zig Zag Cabin — being me this was an article I proceeded to lose. I found it again recently and I’m almost 95% sure it’s the same article.

Anyhow, with or without those boring facts about my losing things the Zig Zag Cabin is great. Take a look…

Noted in the Zig Zag article I mentioned is another reason to like Heath;

“Architect and builder Drew Heath’s Zigzag House abandons the desire for permanence in architecture and examines minimum living requirements and our relationship with place. Heath speaks of human consumption with open disdain, “We are disgusting as human beings the way we live – we really have lost control… there’d be more space in the world for us to go walking if we reduced our consumption of everything.””

Ah yes, reducing the footprints of our lives as a whole. This is one big plan we love here at Offbeat because design is an easy place to create eco-change and it sounds like Heath agrees. You can see more photos here.

Other enthralling Heath work includes:

Blackheath Library

The Cypress House

And last up his sweet boat; the Arkiboat.

So much to adore. You can see more of the Arkiboat and other projects at Heath’s website — I’d hit the cigar house if I were you. He’s a young guy so far as architects go so I assume we’ll be seeing many more amazing designs in years to come.

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Current Mood: Enthralled With Drew Heath

The Wind Shaped Pavilion:

What I like about this design is that it’s not static. Literally. From Jantzen’s site:

“The Wind Shaped Pavilion is a design proposal for a large fabric structure that can be used as a public or private pavilion. As a lightweight fabric structure, the wind slowly and randomly rotates each of the six segments around a central open support frame. This continually alters the shape of the pavilion, while at the same time generating electrical power for its nighttime illumination.”

But here’s the really interesting part…

“The shape of the structure starts out as a relatively symmetrical form. Then the wind begins to alter that shape randomly, with only a slim chance of ever returning to its original symmetry”

I think it would be so neat to live by a structure that’s in constant change. I can’t imagine how much fun that would be to see in action. Think about the possibilities; I’m leaning towards it making a great child center. Kids would brag to their friends, “I go to the moving building.”

Next up: Liberty mentioned water in her comment and I started thinking that we don’t have enough water fun here. Sure we had the underwater resort, but most of us were pretty firm in our desire to stay dry, above land. Hence, the second design I’m sharing.

This is the Malibu Video Beach House. Maybe some of you have seen it. It’s been featured in many places. No idea why I’ve missed it. Too much coke Slurpee brain freeze?

The home was designed to sit between homes on the Pacific coast highway. To alleviate a typical coast home issue, ocean view blockage, the front of the home is designed with television screens that display real time or pre-recorded views and sounds of the ocean. This structure is less my style, but I thought some of you might really enjoy it.

My style or not, it’s intriguing, I love the idea of bringing the view back. As I mention (often) I loved my years in Humboldt. There, homes blocking ocean views on the coast really was an issue.

This is a view from the back.

Interior: (see the birds?)

And a tiny interior view of the atrium (see a larger one here).

Interesting concept, don’t you think.

Something that’s important to recognize about Jantzen’s work is that his designs are heavily rooted in human friendly sustainability. Jantzen is Executive director of The Human Shelter Innovation Institute (HSII). According to his site:

“HSII is a think tank dedicated to creating alternative solutions to the growing global problem of inadequate human shelter… The primary mission of HSII is to explore designs that make use of alternative materials, technologies, and manufacturing techniques… HSII has been developed in part to research new approaches to low-cost, energy efficient, eco-friendly shelters. These can be as simple as temporary housing for poverty-stricken communities or emergency relief programs; or as complex as large-scale housing projects for universities and urban communities.“

Well, and I thought I was doing pretty well building my one passive solar home. Makes you re-think things.

The trend towards sustainable building practices is becoming more evident. On Offbeat alone, we’ve had many recent guests with varying visions of sustainability; the Woodland home, Bart Prince, and many more.

Hopefully the strong human element that’s prominent in HSII will become more mainstream as well. HSII is a non-profit that does rely on outside support so if you’d like to learn more visit Human Shelter.

So, this conclude our visit with Michael Jantzen; although, it’s been very cool so I do believe we may have to have him back at some point. Let’s see… I think that this weekend, we’re going to visit a reader’s home (exciting) and maybe even see some more nifty weekend surprises.

[All photos courtesy of Michael Jantzen (A double hearty thank you!)]

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Human Shelter: Air, Water, & Earth