Contest House - taking the mystery out

There is no mystery to building a high performance house. You don't need unobtanium, you don't need the next greatest clever building material, and most of all you don't need to ask builders to reinvent their material stream and their business model. This is something we can do today.

I've mentioned the "Swedish wall system" numerous times as we've worked on the contest house. Its no mystery - we've shown how they build their houses in multiple posts here. So it is no big reveal to show how we are using this approach in the Lagom House. The principle is straight forward - deeper studs = more insulation. We are increasingly moving towards 2x6 studs in the US, so in the Lagom House we step up to 2x8s. This also gives us the opportunity to use staggered interior and exterior 2x4 studs as another step up of performance by eliminating the thermal bridge of the studs. Into this wall we will cram R30 roof insulation. It will need to be compressed slightly to fit, but its the best size readily available to fill the 2x8 studs. We top that wall off with a layer of foam insulation between the sheathing and the siding, again to break the thermal bridge and raise the total R value. Total estimated insulation value - R38.

Now this is not quite what is happening in Sweden. Their stud sizes are not the same as in the US and it appears they use something between a 2x6 and 2x8. Their insulation appears denser than our readily available batts. They omit the sheathing and instead are using a thick dense insulating board which appears to be able to take and hold nails from the siding. This along with heavy thick solid wood siding panels replaces the plywood sheathing that we use on our houses. This kind of panel is not available here, nor is heavy wood siding the norm. In its place we put readily available foam insulation panels over normal sheathing - nothing unexpected for the carpenters.

At the foundation we employ the "super" insulated slab on grade type system that is being used in Sweden. This is not used on every house there - again this is considered a step up from their normal slab on grade preparation. But the system of pre molded EPS foam forms is the same, and you can see how this is a progression of what they do on a daily basis. The perimeter grade beam is now separated from the floor slab yet still insulated. The entire slab now receives a thick layer of EPS foam below ensuring that the radiant heat goes into the home and not the soil. Considering the way we typically build foundations in the US, and how much effort and money goes into dumping concrete into a hole in the ground, I am very hopeful that some day we can redirect that effort and money towards a highly insulated slab as we see here.

How about frost and foundation heaving? This is always the concern and what has led the US to require footings extend below frost. Yet in Sweden where the winters are longer and more harsh than most of the US they build their houses without the foundations extending below frost depth. Why is that, and what are we missing? I had a conversation about this with an architect visiting from Norway where they use a similar technique. He said plainly that the ambient temperature of the earth below the frost line is much warmer than the winter air. This is well known - go down a few yards and the earth is about 50 deg, all year. Geothermal heating leverages this. Placing a home on top of the earth in fact shields the top layers of earth and permits that warmer ambient ground temperature to extend up to meet the house, and in fact prevents freezing of the earth directly under the foundation. Its plane and simple - the house insulates the earth from the cold and the natural temperature of the earth prevents freezing and heaving of the foundation. The house raises the frost line. The crushed stone bed that is laid as prep prevents wet soil and freezing from occurring directly below the slab, a well known principle even here.

But why not use SIPs, or ICFs, or straw bales, or any other number of promising building tech? Because 99% of the people building homes right now have never worked with any of that stuff. If they do it forces them to work with new suppliers that they have no track record with, it forces them to estimate time and schedule for work they have not done before and don't know how long it will take. It forces them to work with new subcontractors and learn new techniques. In the long run all these things are good, but in the short run it makes houses more expensive and greatly slows the distribution of energy efficient construction. What we are outlining here preserves all of the know how, the supply train, the business relationships, everything that is already in place. We already know how to do this, and we can begin building homes with near Passive House performance right now.

So there it is, a strategy for building high performance houses, TODAY. What are we waiting for?

Contest House - new contest images

We've created more progress images of our Contest Graphics, this time showing the front and rear of the house with people, and spinning wind generators!

The front yard much as we've shown it before, except for the owners talking with their neighbors that stopped by.

And the backyard again much the same except for the owner firing up the grill while the gals check out the garden.

We have also created a tile that discusses the ideas surrounding the layout of the yard, and our assertion that backyards should become useful again.

And we have added a tile to show the neighborhood, and introduce the plan variations for alternate street orientations for the house.

Contest House - caving in to the romance of wind power

Its growing on me. I've got a fever, and the only cure is more wind power.

Yes - I am finding it harder and harder to imagine presenting the house without the wind generators. They just send such an overt message whether it makes complete sense or not. I have to get them spinning in the image.. Well anyhow here is the current state of the front yard. A large light has been added to call out the front door, and hold off the calls for a porch roof.

And here is the current state of the back yard. The rain collection barrels have been added at the right. The clothes line is already in use. And the veggie garden is going gang-busters. Unfortunately you can't see the compost bin in this view. Ok, time to fire up the grill. You can take those empties out to the recycle bin - rubbish court behind the garage.

Contest House - progressing on site, stay with me

I know I'm going to lose some people here I'm sure, but this is where we insert real life into the modern house picture.

The lot model coming together. Still with the rough massing model but the major elements in place here. House is close to the front, minimizing front lawn and making more space in the back. A veg garden or chicken run if you will is along the back, along with our small drying yard with our favorite suburban icon - the whirly clothes line. Not visible behind the garage is a small work+rubbish yard. The wedge shaped garage sports a basketball hoop, and we have a decent size lawn for play or space for gardening. Immediately against the house and partly under the shelter of the deep overhang is a small terrace. Table and chairs can live outside the kitchen here, and a grill of course. Some more lounge like chairs by the living room completes the back yard.

Meanwhile out front we are tapping a host of domestic stereotypes without irony. A white picket fence lines the sidewalk. A useful divider I think when the front yard is fairly shallow. A front porch - terrace really gives you a place to watch the neighborhood, and yes I know this is begging for a porch roof. It will get one in our catalog, but do without I'm afraid for the contest. Some Adirondack chairs on the porch look welcoming. A few cars in the driveway - a thrifty Honda Fit, and a pick-up for those DIY projects and just moving stuff. Since this is just a progress image - screen grab, I am showing the wind mills just to amuse myself. I will be omitting them in the final images. But love their contrast with the rest of the domestic scene - ultimately this is the way it has to be, right? Our solar panels and flower boxes with have to live together, and more and more that is what will represent a complete domestic picture.

People - we need to populate the model with people. More about that coming.

Contest House - a compact siteplan to match a compact house

As I am mocking up the site now, simply to serve as a background for exterior images of the house, I turn to some inspirations for suburban site planning that I think are still very relevant today.

Many years ago when I was still an architecture student I did a self-defined design studio project for designing a suburban subdivision. You have to realize how out of step that was with studying architecture. The suburbia, particularly residential suburbia was an architectural desert. Yet I took a semester to study how we carried out suburban development and the way we made houses, and suburban infrastructure. It was 1984 and most of my naive work as a student predated the New Urbanism movement. My project book is probably still on the library shelf in the architecture school library at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Go look it up if you are curious.

Anyhow back then I dug into a few dozen "pattern books" - that would be catalogs of stock plans - from the library published in the 1940s. Just like today they were full of current as well as reasonable recent designs - things from the 30's and 40's. I was taken with the way they presented the houses, usually with all the plans and elevations presented on one tidy letter size page. Often the ground floor of the house was presented with a rendered site plan - hypothetical - but significant as it demonstrated how the house could be integrated into the site. In a word the site plans were wonderful. These were different days and suburban lots were much smaller than normal today, and the middle class expectation was smaller as well. Yet these siteplans presented a rich and functional environment for these house plans. I had copied some of my favorites from those books all those years ago, and this morning I dug them out of the file in my basement as they were on my mind as I worked up my site plan model. Lets look at them:

The first comes from a house plan simply titled Design for a Six Room House. How great is that! It is a 3 bedroom house. The first thing I should point out is the size of the lot is 35ft wide, and 125 ft deep. That is a small lot, unheard of today. The house has a front loaded garage, unusual for that time, but its near impossible to pass the house to a garage out back. So what do we have brewing in the yard? About half of the yard is dedicated to a Walled Garden. This garden is off the living room and is shown with some stone paving. This would be the extend of the pleasant outdoor living space. Directly behind it is a smaller yard, divided by the garden wall called a Playground Truck Garden or Poultry Run. Dig that - either a small yard for the kids to crash around in, or someplace for your chickens! Very practical. The other half of the yard is taken up by a long space simply called a Drying Yard. Two long clothes lines are shown with a paved walk between them. Again, how practical that you would dedicate nearly half your outdoor space to productive outdoor uses. I won't go on right now about the vilification of clothes lines in suburban America - its been looked down on as lower class and this is a grievous injustice. We all need to save energy, and experience the joy of fresh line dried items. Behind the drying yard is a small space set aside for rubbish and yard work implements - and horrors - a home incinerator! We actually have a relic of one of those in our own yard! All in all I love the purposefulness of these structured yards, and the way they serve the home - not as a burden to maintain, but as a working part of the household. The front yard is very small by comparison - just enough for some street appeal because after all that land has a job to do.

The next is called Design for a Five Room House - surprise! This time on a 30ft wide lot, again 125ft deep. But this design benefits from an alleyway with rear access to a detached garage. Again we have a main garden space, this time shared with play space. Behind it is a poultry or dog run. Yes, not that long ago many of us kept chickens! The other side is again dedicated to a drying yard, and a rubbish and work space behind it. So useful, so civil, so well considered. What has happened to us? A home bought today comes with graded dirt in the yard, if you don't spring for the extra sod. We have certainly lost our way here - all that land to tax your time, to maintain, but never giving anything back. And we all know that it so wants to! Chickens, or a small vegetable garden, enough lines to really dry all your laundry, a discrete place for tools and trash, and a limited area to enjoy as well as a limited area to manicure.

The last is a more familiar proportion lot at 50ft wide by 100ft deep. Nearly the same as our contest house presumed lot. Here they manage to pass the driveway by the house - much more willing to squeeze the driveway against the house than we seem to be today. In the back the drive widens to an Auto Court serving a two car garage at the back of the lot. Again we have a walled garden, a drying lawn, and a playground truck garden or chicken run. The front yard is very small, and the rear yard is maximized.

I think the practices we see in these old site plans suit our sustainably trending present. Living in the suburbs is a luxury, and a luxury that we can begin to pay for by using the given land to reduce our load on the world in other ways. Line drying clothes is a no-brainer. Composting kitchen scraps, and yard waste to use in the gardens, chickens sure, but perhaps a small vegetable garden will come in less conflict with regressive zoning regulations. A working space in the yard for trash and work bench and yard tools - and DIY projects. We can do this people. Its not some horrible sacrifice to live more sustainably. It is an incredibly rich, rewarding, and satisfying choice. And it comes with a backyard that Rocks!

Contest House - building context

The next step is creating exterior images of the house, in a schematic context - that means we need to build a little neighborhood.

The individual lot, compact, small front yard in order to maximize the rear yard. The detached garage provides some alternate storage in the absence of a basement. The house I grew up in sat on a lot this dimension - 60ft x 100ft, so I feel very familiar with the scale of this density.

While a neighborhood full of Lagom Houses is unlikely to start we'll present an idealized context. The houses on one side of the street are the second plan variation for the proper street+solar orientation. We will be replacing the lot in the center with a more detailed site model that has the more detailed house model plugged into it. This part should be fun. As the modern house is so often cast as aloof and minimalist we will strive our hardest to present it as domestic and lived in.

Contest House - to show wind generators or not

Should the first image we show of the house have it topped with wind generators, or not?

Here we see the house with the wind generators - but the inside of the shroud has been painted white to reduce the contrast we were seeing in the previous image, or...

..do we dispense with showing wind generators for now and let the house forms stand on their own for the time being, solar collectors still in place.

I have to say that I think I like the interaction between the wind mills and the overlaying title letters, where as without them the house appears simpler and cleaner. But I tend to gravitate towards noise and complexity. We are still going to show the the wind mills in the image in Tile2 where we describe the characteristics of the house. Thanks for the great active feedback I've been getting all through this process.

Contest House - second tile

Doing more mocking up of presentation tiles today.

First draft of the second tile. We want to launch here right into the important characteristics of the house design on the second tile. A section cut-away begins to give us a feeling for the space inside the house, as well as the overall structure. The three strategies for making house lagom are described at the top of the tile:

- An efficient and compact house design that lives larger than its size.
- A platform for both active energy systems and passive heating & cooling.
- A highly insulated envelope that reduces energy consumption.

Here another draft of the first tile. I was not sure if I should present the house right here with solar panels and wind generators on the roof. I decided to move the roof scape up to be partially obscured behind the "Lagom House" title to subdue them a bit. I welcome feedback on this - should these alternative energy accessories be flying on the first tile, or should they be introduced as options later on?

Contest House - first tile

Beginning the presentation graphics for the contest.

The contest allows up to 9 images, and I plan on using all of them simply to increase the amount of info conveyed about the design proposal, to better explain the design. On the contest site they are presented in a grid of thumbnails which I am referring to individual images as "tiles".

The first tile is most important. You need to hook the browsers on that first tile into looking into your design more closely. To that end I want them to be able to grasp the house immediately - visually both floor plans need to be presented, and an image that captures the spirit of the house. Text wise I want to present them with the overriding concept of the home. We want to feed both visual and verbal browsers and entice them to click on to the next image.

The image here is a placeholder, and is obscuring the title text. The final image will have the house on a white background, with house in context images appearing elsewhere in the presentation.

Contest House - quick walk through the house

Take a quick walk around the house with me.

In the living room - I need to add some color to the foreground furniture, hmm..

Over in the kitchen - I think there is plenty of room even with a table.

Come upstairs to a bedroom - this is the master bedroom, not gigantic but fits a queen.

Upstairs hall - the window seat at the top of the steps, linen cabinet, and the homework desk.

Ok folks, its officially time for me to start lobbying you for your vote. When voting opens on the FreeGreen site I will be posting links and humbly asking you to vote for the Lagom House. Contests are to win after all, and even though this design will always make its way into our catalog it would certainly be nice to have a contest win as a feather in its cap. Stay tuned for me to beg your support.

Contest House - modest dress

Contest House taking shape

Contest House trio

Contest House - solar orientation, street orientation

Orienting a house design to the sun is easy. But put it on a small urban/suburban site, introduce a street grid, suddenly everything may not be going your way.

We admit that we've designed ourselves into this corner to a degree. We've made a decision to use an asymmetrical massing for the house which in turn dictates which way the house massing must be oriented for the sun. Its not completely a fabrication however as the asymmetrical profile does serve the small footprint of the house allowing us to make a 1.5 story design on a narrow dimension. But it does impose restrictions such as the dictate on solar orientation. Working with such limits introduces compromises which can be at once necessary and pleasing as they can create unexpected quirks or complexities to a design. And so we have here with our Lagom House as we strive to create variations on the design to accommodate different site orientations while maintaining the necessary solar orientation.

I've hinted at this in the past posts on the design process as I've been developing all three versions of the house concurrently, yet I've been using only one to share the progress of the design. So new we have three prototypes, two for streets running roughly east west, one for the north side of the street with the sloped roof facing the street, and one for the south side with the sloped roof facing the rear yard. The third version for north south streets slopes the roof towards the side yard.

The south side version is what we've been looking at, so lets look at how the floor plan shifts for the north side. The ground floor plan is essentially the same except for the flip of the relative direction of the stair. The front door shifts slightly towards the living room, and the foot of the stair is now right beside the entry foyer. This is not at all a bad arrangement and still retains the ability to step up and through the landing and proceed to the kitchen. A little bit more subtle is the change in orientation for the bedrooms, now facing the front yard rather than the back yard. This is not a great compromise in privacy, but some people may have a distinct preference.

The east west version makes greater compromises. First the plan never really makes an complete change over to the narrow deep orientation as it still relies on access to a reasonable side yard. The kitchen retains a door now on the side of the house, and the living areas dual doors are now shared one on the side and one to the rear. The entry consumes a good portion of the "service corridor" portion of the floor plan in this scheme. While there is a bit more storage as a result the home office area and utility room suffer for the loss of space to the foyer. It is possible that some of the mechanical equipment could find a place under the stair or in the new storage cabinets running on the outside wall between the kitchen and living room, but I did not want to assume that while laying out the plan.

Contest House - upstairs, the bedrooms

We've shown the development of the massing and the ground floor plan, but before we proceed to the solar orientation variations on the house we need to look at the second floor.

Each bedroom includes a dormer that extends the area of the room to a tolerable size. These are not big bedrooms - they are for sleeping, really not much room for a lot more than that. I think the closet space is good however, and if done with a wardrobe unit it can eliminate the need for a freestanding dresser which there is not really room for. If you can do that you will have room a chair by the window. At the top of the steps is a large window with a window seat. This may or may not be desirable depending on your site, but its a nice opportunity for a unique sitting place that makes the house live larger. Also in the upstairs hall is the kids homework desk - a long affair wide enough to manage two kids, computers, and crafts. Some space is reserved for a hall linen cabinet as well. Then we have two bathrooms at opposite ends of the house. The hall bath for the kids, and the slightly larger bath off the master bedroom. The hall also can provide access to an attic level HVAC unit if needed. The attic space is not large, but can provide needed mechanical space depending on the mix of equipment you need for your region.

So there is the basic second floor arrangement.

Contest House - having our cake and eating it too.

Discussion on the previous post led me to work the floor plan some more seeking to gain back the legitmate laundry + utility room, and the ground floor powder room we believe Americans will demand.

Just not comfortable with the combination powder room + laundry + utility room from the first go round of the floor plan, we dove back in to see where we could possibly trim fat. Well the answer it seems was staring us in the face, and that was the 16 feet of available desktop space in the home office area. Now 16ft would be great, especially if you wanted to accommodate two people. But we will have an upstairs "homework" desk for the kids so we don't have to have space for them here. Plus having a legitimate kitchen table also makes a great place to do homework. So we resolved to carve a tiny powder room out of the home office.

The result is still over 12ft of desktop length. Certainly enough for two people, or the option to have a vertical storage cabinet. The powder room is small and will require a tiny wall hung sink, but a small compromise really. Meanwhile back on the other side of the plan we have the old combo space now completely dedicated to laundry and utilities. I'm relived that I can make more space here because it widens the options for HVAC systems. This is important if people want to include a solar water heating system or AC air handler or whatever is appropriate for their climate. Side by side rather than stack laundry is also possible if your HVAC needs only one piece of equipment. We can also gain an entry door through the laundry + utility room, which is not something everybody wants or needs, but if you like that direct access its great that you can have it in this small floor plan.

The developing massing model is a bit more informative than the prior wire-frames. The next step is revisiting the alternate floor plans. With the massing of the house having such a definitive solar orientation we now have to consider the situation where the house could be on the other side of the street. In other words facing the wrong way for our solar platform. We also have to consider street orientation - currently it works on a street running east west, but how about north south streets. We need a variation that has a front door on the end of the house.

Contest House - comparing plans

The compact size of our proposed design triggers a series of compromises. We look at the plan of the typical Swedish catalog house to see if we can gain any insight.

Part of our effort to keep the footprint of the contest house design small also limits our options. We want the living spaces to feel spacious and open, yet our experience is that running any interior room from side to side in a house actually contributes to it feeling smaller. Somehow the presence of a "space beyond" where you are, or a "space between" here and there can contribute to a home feeling perceptually larger. When a house is small this becomes an important consideration.

I've placed the plan of the Anebyhus Lygnern design above the sketch of our contest house plan. The first thing we notice is that the Swedish house is essentially a 1 story design with two bedrooms on the ground floor. Officially it is what the Swedes call a 1.5 design, or a one story house with the option for the finishing of the second floor. That option would add 3 bedrooms, a bath, and a common family room to the home effectively doubling its size. With the upstairs finished the house tops out at around 2000sqft, 33% more than our target of 1500 sqft.

Yet there are significant things going on in the Swedish plan that save space. Things that are considered floor plan "poison" in the US. These are not criticisms of the Swedish design, but rather highlights of different cultural expectations in the US and Sweden. First of all the master bedroom shares its bathroom with the secondary bedroom - no private master bath. Compounding this is the bathroom is also doing duty as a powder room for guests. The second bedroom is also awkwardly located right at the entry foyer. Now if the second floor was completed, all of these issues resolve - the second bedroom becomes an ideal home office. But we will still find only one shared bathroom upstairs. Yet all of this shared bathroom saves space and makes for the opportunity for a very useful utility/laundry room. This is something that we are forced to sacrifice in order to create a first floor powder room. Utilities and laundry relegated to a closet in the same space - not a flexible solution. The American expectation for a master bathroom, and the awkwardness of sending a guest upstairs to find a bathroom puts us in the difficult position to provide 2.5 baths in a compact 1500 sqft home. Yet if we can package these desires into a plan at this size we've put good value and greater market appeal into a small house.

Contest House - first sketches

I've begun sketching out the massing of the house - wireframe drawings posted

I am planning on using a single slope roof with the intention of the house facing sunward, so that the upper portion of the roof slope can form a platform for solar collectors. Its functional, but also a design element - overtly stating its purpose through its form. Solar collectors could be placed on a conventional roof profile but that would make less of a statement. Scott and I are having a bit of a debate about this right now. He feels that profile is too much "design statement" and not enough "design solution". We don't agree here, and I acknowledge that the kind of modern houses in the Swedish catalogs are much more modest in their architectural exuberance. Yet compared to the range of wild design themes often used for high end modern houses, and the quietness of authentic vernacular homes, I do think I'm striking a good balance. Not only here but in the design themes of most of our house plans.

I'd love to hear readers opinions on this. I know there is not much here to react to yet, but you could look back to the XHouse3 for example and have the same discussion. If we want modern to live in the mainstream of home building in the US, what is the proper level of design? How far do we push it, how extreme or modest is going to be successful in the wider market?

example of swedish modern/traditional (MoTrad) house: Anabyhus Lygnern

Contest house - owner profile and our guiding principle

The Who's Next contest did not provide a list of rooms or size for the home, but rather a profile of the owners leaving the contestants to determine the appropriate response.

We are really left to make the size of the house as we see fit which should elicit a interesting range of responses from contestants. We have elected to use the "Starter House" profile offered by the organizers. The profile tells us the owners will have 1 or 2 children, so we are going to take that as a need for a 3 bedroom house. We want to keep the house compact, and to us that means pushing the boundaries of what we already offer in our catalog. So our goal is to make this home design smaller than any other 3 bedroom house in our collection. In keeping with the idea of a "starter house" we are shooting for 1500 sqft. A home office is called for in the profile but to hit our target size its doubtful we can fit a home office the size of a 4th bedroom. There are many more factors from the profile, some of which we may or may not be able to satisfy within the size limit we are imposing. But that is our choice and points towards what will be our guiding principle for the design.

Scott Hedges introduced us to a Swedish concept, an idea that does not have a single word representation in English. The word is "lagom" (sounds like La-Gom) and in Sweden this is an idea which underlies much of the culture and disposition of the Swedish people. An adjective, lagom means roughly "just the right amount" or "just enough is best". Its a sentiment of appropriateness as well as modesty, quite the polar opposite of the driving motivation in the US of more is (almost) always better. We don't have a word for this idea, because we basically never think this idea. Scott described it to me well:

"The idea of Lagom as I understand it is that it means “the right amount” or more accurately “an optimal amount” … but this doesn’t get it either … Lagom conveys the notion of having just what you need and no more. It means more than just what is good for you, but good in a more expansive and considerate sense. It is the idea that nothing should be added and nothing should be taken away. "

That last thought really hits it home for me. Nothing added, nothing taken away. It suggests virtue in balance, and balance to me is a driving concept of sustainability, not just in building, but in living.

So with Scott's encouragement I want to endeavor to make lagom the driving principle of this design. As an idea it was not completely unfamiliar to me. I believe that there is a parallel sentiment in the community of people that have driven the revival of modern houses over the past 10 years - what I call the ReModern Movement. Way back when Dwell magazine first started and I was spending so much time on their first internet messageboard there was a strong consensus about what having a modern house meant to the people that came there looking for homes. It was not a simple aesthetic choice, or style choice. To these people a modern home meant moving towards a simpler and more manageable lifestyle. A choice that would bring you a fresh start to concentrate on what was important to you, and to brush aside the baggage and associations of past ideas of what constituted "home". It was a lifestyle choice that would enable you by lightening the burden of creating, maintaining, and paying for a traditional image of home. Instead replaced by a simpler, cleaner, easier living home - something that did not make demands on you so much as serve you in your pursuit of life. It was not the pursuit of the modern home as an extraordinary trophy, but rather the desire for the modern home as ordinary in every sense.

We never had a word for that idea. But lagom comes pretty close, pretty close indeed.

Designing a new house for a contest

We have begun working on a new house for a design contest we've entered called Who's Next and sponsored by house plan publisher FreeGreen.

Regular readers of our blog may remember that our 0751 RS House design is sold through FreeGreen's Open Source house plan market, and not here on our own site. Open Source is a great way for architects to get into the house plan business, and we've been supportive of the marketplace as a way to make good design more available via houseplans. And that brings us to the design contest. Unlike most design competitions Who's Next does not use anonymous submissions. Anonymity is usually used to rule out bias in judging, but what is lost is a great promotional opportunity. What this means is that I can share my work on my entry here on the blog and you can watch the entire process of the design coming together over the next few months. There is no requirement that we keep our work under wraps till the contest is over in order to hold anonymity. Whether we win the contest or not the design will find its way into our plan collection.

The competition offers two profiles for the hypothetical occupants. The first is called a "Starter Home" for a young couple with plans for 1 or 2 children. The second is for a couple with grown children with plans to retire in the house. Also on the agenda is to use sustainable and green design principals for the house designs. We are expected to choose one of the two profiles and work towards a solution for that scenario. While its an interesting contest we also have our own agenda to bring to the table, and in fact we are using the contest as an excuse to work through a number of issues that have been central to the ideas discussed here on the blog.

The first idea will be to create a compact and efficient house design that we see as being the way forward in the post-housing bust world. This is something we've begun promoting through our XHouse collection and we see this contest entry eventually fitting in to that plan group.

The second issue will be to specifically address sustainable building practices in our design, and eventually our plan set. We've always taken the approach that our house plans were ready to accept emerging green tech, but left this open ended. The contest entry will be more demonstrative, and the specifics will find their way into the Construction Prints.

And finally this contest entry will be our first practical application of some of the building techniques from Sweden that we have been studying and reporting about on the blog here. Our correspondent from Sweden, Scott Hedges, is going to be consulting to us and giving us feedback on how to apply some of their practices here.

Watch here for updates on the design process.