Student Dedicated to Sustainable Building

“After my senior year of high school, I was living in Tanzania and noticed traditional building techniques were being replaced by foreign techniques that didn’t fit into the environment,” Ayodele Washington says. “So I learned about the traditional architecture of the Maasai house, which is basically a mud hut. They have been used for hundreds … Read more

Restoring a Historic Stone Building in England

Jikyeong bought a deralict prop­erty that had been stripped back by a pre­vi­ous owner and renov­a­tion work had stalled before it had really begun. Many of the sur­round­ing dry-stone walls had star­ted to col­lapse. Jikyeong says, “Ever since mov­ing to Eng­land in 2000, I had dreamed of own­ing a tra­di­tional York­shire stone house, There is … Read more

Three Decades of Off-Grid Living in Arizona

Gale Marsland fell in love with Arizona’s desert climate and eventually built an off-grid home with her husband using sustainable design, passive solar principles, and traditional Southwestern building techniques. Living without utility power, they relied on photovoltaic solar panels, batteries, propane, and innovative cooling systems, gradually upgrading their technology as renewable energy became more efficient … Read more

A Historic Building is Transformed Into a Delightful Home

The local town store will always carry special significance for the owner of this imaginatively reborn house. What was once a 19th-century hub in Victoria, Australia is now the place she calls home. Historically, this was a very busy gold mining area with about 6000 people living in the town. But a fire went through … Read more

Tiny Homes For Good

Andrew Lunetta saw the same pattern over and over while working at homeless shelters in Syracuse, New York. Men would leave, move into the cheapest housing available, and soon return looking for a bed. After nearly a decade, the lesson was clear to him: People were not failing at housing; housing was failing them. Lunetta … Read more