Arocordis Design Blog
Arocordis 2023 Project Updates & Design Themes
Reflecting on a year of residential architecture across Vermont—gratitude for our clients, craftspeople, and community partnerships.
An Earth-Sheltered Net-Zero Modern Home Design
Partnering with nature: how earth-sheltered home design solves Vermont's harsh winters while blending seamlessly into the landscape.
How to Design a Garage-Flex Live-Space in Vermont
Planning a custom garage, art studio, or ADU? Explore best practices for flex buildings, climate resilience, and universal design.
Green Home Design Trends in Vermont: An Overview
Explore top Vermont green home design trends: smaller footprints, ADUs, hybrid prefabrication, and local sustainable materials.
A small Net-zero home designed to become a Vermont forever home
Read about case study from an unbuilt project adapted from our Inside-Out House, a net-zero-ready prototype home design.
A Vermont Mountain Meadow net-zero ready home
It started with an email
Recently, a client sought us out to adapt our ZigZag House2 home design for her property in Northern Vermont. For her, the 1,000 square foot 2-bedroom single-level home was a great starting point but she wanted to adapt it in a variety of ways to better suit her needs. A home-based writer, she wrote in a small specially design cabin bucolically located on the edge of a large pond with scenic views of the hills and mountains to the west. The primary two-story single-family home nearby anchored the hillside property, a former dairy farm.
Our client sought to lease the main house to another family while designing and building a new compact home for herself nearby around the same pond as the writer’s cabin. She set some inspiring goals which included:
To create a sustainable climate-positive home while also allowing her to travel for months at a time, leaving the home in easy to maintain hibernation mode while away for extended periods.
Design and refine the existing ZigZag2 House design to be even simpler, unifying some of the separate living volumes…..