The Solar Homestead by Appalachian State University was the People’s Choice winner in the Solar Decathlon 2011, and now virtually anyone in the world can get the same home from North Carolina-based Deltec Homes.  Deltec, a pioneer of round prefab, will build and ship the self-sustaining home, and send royalties from their sales back to the university located in Boone.  This is apparently “the first time a Decathlon winner is being made available to the consumer,” according to Deltec Homes.

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Connect:Homes is a Los Angeles-based manufacturer of prefab homes founded by Jared Levy and Gordon Stott (formerly with Marmol Radziner) on a mission to reduce the delivery costs associated with modular construction and make sustainable homes more affordable. To make that happen, Levy and Stott spent the last three years designing, prototyping, and patenting a system to cost-effectively deliver prefab homes, and they put their awesome prototype on display at Dwell on Design 2012.

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You may recall a practical green prefab by SMPLy Mod that we featured about a year ago.  This duplex is by the same design firm, SMPL Design Studio (Joel Tanner), with new partners 9 Dot Engineering and Mod Home Developments.  The team employed modular construction to finish the duplex at 133 Moyle, and the homes perform quite well for being so far north: they require 55% less energy for heating and power.

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Non-profit Homeward Bound of Marin and California-based Blu Homes recently announced a partnership to build an affordable housing project for homeless families in Marin County.  The Oma Village project will replace a former drug and alcohol rehabilitation center with a community of 14 net-zero energy one- and two-bedroom homes.

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If you’re looking for a unique place to stay in Majorca, Spain, just minutes from the center of Palma, there’s a posh-looking home built with shipping containers which is offered for rent through startup Airbnb.  The one-bedroom, one-bathroom house has a kitchen, Japanese garden, washer/dryer, outdoor deck, and pool included in the rental from roughly $113 per night.  It’s quite the awesome abode, from what I can tell of the pictures, and provides another example of what can be done with old shipping containers.

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