Starting at 10:00 am this Saturday, June 14, a custom-made Sunset Breezehouse designed by MKD will be open to the public in Santa Barbara, California.  The open house will happen in conjunction with the Built Green Santa Barbara Expo, Conference, & Tour, but if you’re not able to attend, Michelle Kaufmann has been posting photos and details of the home for the past couple weeks.  The home, in addition to having all the various green materials and products typically used in MKD homes, has a PV solar array and sustainable landscape design that fits the home just perfectly. 

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HOM Escape in Style made its debut at Dwell on Design this weekend and drew a considerable crowd.  Apartment Therapy said HOM was their favorite home on display, and Curbed liked its interior design.  Of the three models that HOM plans for production, the (smaller) 1000 sf design was exhibited throughout the weekend in LA.  HOM designs cost in the $200 psf range, which calculates to approximately $200,000 for a 1000 sf house.

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This is a Flatpak house in Aspen, Colorado.  I stumbled upon these shots in Flickr, so I don’t have much background on the project.  But we’ve featured a modern Flatpak home before in the Goodwin-Wise Flatpak.  Flatpak houses each have their own particular and interesting features, but the Flatpak system is the same.  It’s a menu of components for living that includes walls, cabinets, bathrooms, kitchen, and various built-ins.  The components are fabricated and designed to meet the needs of the site and owner.

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Since mid-January, Taliesin students have been blogging on PrairieMod about their project to build a small modern home on the grounds of Taliesin West.  The students, with Dean Victor Sidy and Jennifer Siegal of OMD, designed a simple but elegant home with sustainability in mind.  At first, they were going to prefabricate the structure, but later decided to go instead with on-site, panelized construction using SIPs for the walls, roof, and floor.  Now, the exterior is certainly taking shape and the interior will be finished throughout the summer.  When done, the structure will demonstrate passive and active environmental control systems, water catchment, top-tier insulation, a gray water system, native landscaping, and a solar power system.

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The mkSolaire is currently the featured attraction at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) as part of the Smart Home: Green + Wired exhibition.  As you can tell from the above video, it’s a prefab that includes cutting-edge green materials, energy efficient systems, a living roof, and a smart technology system.  I love those rectangular, green tiles in the bathroom — check it out. 

++Smart Home: Green + Wired Debuts at MSI [JG]