Builder’s annual show home will be hard to miss at the International Builders’ Show (IBS), and not just because it will be built inside the convention center’s main hall. LivingHome, the 11th in the magazine’s show home series, will allow attendees to once again engage with a wealth of ideas and visionary thinking, this time packaged in an efficient yet surprisingly spacious 2,426-square-foot, two-story modular home.
The contemporary house, designed by KieranTimberlake Associates of Philadelphia, satisfies a trio of modern-day housing goals: a financially affordable, green-built, well-designed home that both the architect and LivingHomes, the Santa Monica, Calif., builder, anticipate will be replicated, with some customization, for the masses.
“There’s no doubt that compact development, urban infill, green building, and contemporary design are all converging to create a popular and profitable market niche for housing,” says Boyce Thompson, Builder’s editorial director, who brought the team together. “The demographics of aging baby boomers moving down and echo-boomers looking for their first house in vibrant, urban neighborhoods only add to that dynamic.”
A few weeks prior to the IBS, the home will emerge near-complete from a Southern California factory and shipped to the convention center for final assembly and finishing touches at booth #C5288. It will feature a pair of stacked, 500-square-foot modules to create the home’s main living areas, while a panelized wall, floor, and roof system will demonstrate the flexibility of the factory-built concept as the framework for a third upstairs bedroom supported by a carport below. “This hybrid approach to home building [combining modular and panelized systems] foreshadows the future of the industry,” says Steve Glenn, president of LivingHomes. “The time and materials efficiencies, design flexibility, quality control, and affordability of this house will play an important role in the industry’s recovery.”
Several leading building products manufacturers, led by Andersen Windows and Whirlpool Corp., sponsored the show home and will display their latest offerings to the industry—all of them fully vetted as eco-friendly to support one of the primary goals of the project: enhancing and leveraging the resource efficiencies attained by its small footprint and construction methods. That being said, the home will not be eligible for green building certification until it is sold and placed on an actual lot and foundation, allowing the elements of the parcel to factor into the home’s total rating score.
LivingHome will be open for free guided tours during the exhibit hours of IBS and featured in the April 2009 issue of Builder. In the meantime, the home’s construction progress, project team, and sponsors (highlighted in a virtual tour of the house), as well as videos, webinars, and blog entries about the concept and the project, can be viewed online at http://builderlivinghome.com.
Project Details
Project: LivingHome, Las Vegas Convention Center
Unit size: 2,426 square feet (two levels)
Bedrooms/Bathrooms: 3/2.5
Builder: LivingHomes, Santa Monica, Calif.
Architect: KieranTimberlake Associates, Philadelphia
Interior designer: Color Design Art, Culver City, Calif.
Manufacturer: Profile Structures, Santa Fe Springs, Calif.
Web site: http://builderlivinghome.com
Directions (from convention center): The LivingHome show home is located at Booth #C5288 in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. The booth is located against the south wall of the hall.
Yes, the 2009 New American Home is big, but it doesn’t live big. Despite nearly 9,000 square feet of conditioned space, long sightlines that provide glimpses of the floor plan, and a palette of outdoor areas and features, the house is comfortable and in some places downright intimate thanks to the expert orientation, scale, and proportion of its living spaces and relationship to the outdoors.
Deemed a desert contemporary, with its telltale horizontal lines and flat roofs, the 26th annual version of the industry’s longest-running show home program revives and updates the modern style for detached housing. It also pushes the envelope of green building, thanks to an infill lot and innovative systems for the home’s structural walls, cool roof, and conditioned air distribution, the latter driven by a gas-powered engine that uses no electricity.
Those systems serve as the backbone for an abundance of products that enabled the home to achieve Gold certification per the NAHB’s Model Green Building Guidelines. In addition to both photovoltaic and solar thermal panels (the former a new, dual-sided design that boosts efficiency) that offset almost all of the home’s electrical demands from the power grid, the house boasts Energy Star–rated appliances, high-performance windows and glass doors, low-VOC–emitting finishes, water-saving fixtures, and a technology package that facilitates total control.
The cool products continue with motorized telescoping pocket doors that blur the lines between indoor and outdoor spaces, an automatic louvered shading system, pedestal-set courtyard pavers that allow proper drainage, and a green roof atop a freestanding rejuvenation room that appears to float on the zero-edge pool.
All of those systems and products are packaged in a spectacular presentation of spaces on four levels, including a basement, and topped by a sky deck that offers a panoramic view of the Las Vegas Strip and the rest of the valley.
Not to be outdone, the backyard offers a multitude of public and contemplative opportunities including a full, swim-up kitchen/bar, a covered TV and billiards lounge, a rejuvenation room, a spa, and a Zen garden—not to mention the pool itself, in which the water level is set within an inch of the finished floor level of the great room (separated by a deep covered patio and a water trough), then lowered for swimming.
The 2009 New American Home is co-sponsored by Builder and the National Council of the Housing Industry. It will be open for free, guided tours during exhibit floor hours with free shuttle bus service from the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Project Details
Project: The New American Home 2009, Las Vegas
Unit size: 8,816 square feet (conditioned space on four levels) plus 1,791 square feet outdoor living space
Bedrooms/Bathrooms: 4/7 (including four half-baths)
Builder: Blue Heron, Las Vegas
Architect: Danielian Associates Architecture & Planning, Irvine, Calif.
Interior designer: Robb & Stucky Interiors, Las Vegas
Landscape architect: Summers/Murphy & Partners, Dana Point, Calif.
Sponsors: Builder, Washington; The National Council of the Housing Industry, Washington
Consultant: IBACOS Consortium, Pittsburgh (performance testing)
Web site: www.tnah.com
Shuttle Service: Free, roundtrip shuttles will be available near the main entrance to the convention center, on the north side of the Grand Concourse. See the show home information booth inside the Grand Concourse to reserve a seat.
Driving Directions (from convention center): South on Paradise Rd.; left on E. Russell Rd.; right on S. Eastern Ave.; left on E. Sunset Dr./NV-562-East; right on Tomiyasu Ln.; right on Agave Azul; house is on the right. Please take the free shuttle bus. Parking is extremely limited.
Drive time: Approximately 15 minutes (7 miles).