Modern Farmhaus | net-zero prototype

Sustainable Design & Living: Where to Start?

      Curious about sustainable living at home? Do you wonder how to integrate home design, beauty, function, and a concern for energy efficiency, while creating a more predictable affordable future? Do you want to downsize from your current oversized family home to a smaller one that is easier to maintain and afford over the long term? With your new custom home and its design, do you want to optimize the balance all these factors aligned with your project goals? What’s the blueprint?

Embracing the latest advancements in sustainable design, we prioritize energy conservation, water efficiency, and eco-friendly construction methods. From inception to completion, our sustainable building design approach seamlessly marries aesthetics with environmental responsibility, ensuring your home is not only beautiful but also a beacon of sustainability.

      We too have considered these factors over the last few years and have developed, and now have designed a modern farmhaus prototype that addresses them holistically. This home and site design is also inspired by the iconic front-house, mid-house, back-house, and barn New England vernacular and traditions of the working landscape of Vermont. We can tailor it to your needs and vision.

The Site Plan: Bringing the Outdoors In

       In this Modern Farmhaus prototype design, we bring the outdoors in and extend the indoors outward with a west-facing terrace, and garden beds beyond with extensive room for planting around the home and its grounds. We site the home into a fairly flat setting with room for photovoltaic solar trackers to offset home and the garage live/ work space energy to a net-zero energy usage level.  A vegetable and wildflower garden rests to the west of the garage and below the solar tracker orchard. Rainwater collection barrels lay near garden beds around the house to help reduce the use of well water or city or town water usage. For now, the home is oriented the long way from north to south. Depending on your site, we would work with you to adjust this prototype home design for solar orientation, topography, significant natural features, views, and other factors unique to it.

At our core, we specialize in sustainable home design services that seamlessly integrate energy-efficient technologies, renewable materials, and forward-thinking architectural principles. Our team of dedicated professionals strives to exceed expectations, offering bespoke solutions that cater to your unique vision while minimizing environmental impact.

The Floor Plan:

      The lower level has 1,240 square feet of living, dining, kitchen and the master bedroom suite.  Walk upstairs to find an open studio overlooking the lower level with two bathrooms and a full bath. The upper living level is 749 square feet.  The separate live work garage has over 450 square feet of space on each level. There is no basement, but that could be added if required providing more living and storage space.

Open Plan Living: Interconnectedness 

      The floor plans show interconnections, flowing spaces, and intentional open views across the spaces from Kitchen to the living and dining spaces and from the living / dining areas up to the studio loft above and kitchen below. Overhead skylights bring daylight into living and dining area below, and lightens the studio space by the stair above. Near the stair and across from the kitchen lay a central storage and work area with washer / dryer and electrical and mechanical plant.  

What is next? Refining the Design and Getting into the Details.

      As a starting point consider the following aspects in the design of your Modern Farmhaus before you contact us:

• Important spaces: Assemble your list of key must-haves, like-to-haves, and maybe someday future interior and exterior spaces. Add a little description in each section with short summaries of what is important and why. Identify question areas for us to discuss. Do not forget about your storage requirements, especially if you are downsizing.

• Project timeline and budget: Can you do some of the work in phases over the course of five to ten years? Or must it be done all at once to meet some kind of reason? What is your budget for purchasing property, adding needed infrastructure, building the home, driveway, porches and decks, interior furnishings and fittings? For more on that see this article we wrote.

• Timeframe in the home: How long do you anticipate living in this home? Will you pass it on to others in your family?

• Guests and or AirBnB: Do you need guest living spaces or will you your whole home or part of it for short-term rentals with a separate living areas? What is allowed in your town or community?

• Building Enclosure: The building envelope considers fairly high-performing insulation levels such as (R40) 12" double stud dense packed cellulose wall framing with 2" rigid out-sulation, (R60) 18" dense packed vented cathedral ceilings with TJI's, (R20) 4" min of underslab insulation and (R10) 2" foundation wall insulation.

• Heating and Cooling: Possibly a small size air source heat pumps for heating, whisperlite fans or similar in the bathrooms for ventilation on each level.

• Siding: Cedar shake siding with a rain-screen gap likely using Huber or similar Zip-sheathing to assist with air-sealing below on the wall and below the vented standing seam roofing. Other alternatives include board and batten, clapboard siding, corrugated metal panels and metal trim and more.

• Doors and Windows: Low-e clear triple insulated glazing and doors with appropriate solar window coverings to mitigate heat gain on the interior. There may be more specific tuning of the windows and doors depending on the face orientation of the home. Garage door sizes and features like windows and insulation.

• Fireplace or Stove: There would be an optional very small high-efficiency wood or pellet stove, more for the "spiritual" fire with through-wall venting to assist with fresh air intake.  Or windows could be opened when the fire is lit for added ventilation.  

• Interior finishes and fittings: Simple durable interior finishes, hopefully locally sourced wood trim, low or no volatile organic compound paint or stain finishes. Deciding on finishes appropriate for your lifestyle, life stage, and family usage are a longer conversation worth paying close attention to ease of long-term care, warranties, and eventual replacement and recycling or upcycling where possible.

• Kitchen and Bath Design: Preliminary thoughts on size and performance requirements of both types of space, number and types of fixtures, how space is needed, storage and other needs.

      All the detailing could be designed and built to low-energy home performance levels all contributing to net-zero-energy usage on a yearly basis.  Another step during design could be energy modeling, doing that will help in right-sizing the internal heating and ventilation system, and optimizing the window sizes and glazing specifications.  Depending on the homeowner available time and focus, consider planning for a vegetable garden to further enrich sustainable living. If gardening takes too much time, join a local Community Supported Agriculture farm to get your vegetables year round.

our cutting-edge sustainable design architecture firm, where we redefine the future of living through innovative sustainable building design. Our commitment to environmental consciousness drives our passion for creating eco-friendly spaces that harmonize with nature.

Third-Party Green Building Programs: An Overview

      Of course, achieving those goals depends on the client, their budget and schedule, whether or not to pursue local or national high-performance building certification, and at what level of performance.  This might mean for example here in Vermont, enrolling in the Vermont Energy Star Home program or the High Performance Homes program run by Efficiency Vermont.  Depending on where you're located in the U.S. you may want to consult the National Energy Star website to learn more.

Enrolling and completing such programs benefits the homeowner in a number of ways. Firstly during the construction phase and operation of the home, and then on the back end, providing green certification of the quality of the home for future reselling. This backend grows increasingly relevant as more and more Statewide Multiple Listing Services add Green Building-related components to available listing criteria for homebuyers.  Called the Green MLS toolkit nationally this initiative has taken hold in Colorado, the Atlanta area, Chicago, Portland, Oregon, and increasingly elsewhere.

Qualifying projects for Efficiency Vermont's Residential programs receive energy consultation and performance testing services helping ensure your high-performing project complies with their program leading to receiving helpful financial incentives and certification of performance levels reached.  Similarly, NYSERDA in New York State,  Mass Save in Massachusetts,  NHSAVES in New Hampshire, and EfficiencyMaine all provide Energy Star and in some cases High Performing home programs like Vermont.

Other more stringent third-party verification programs exist such as Passive House, Living Building Challenge, and USGBC LEED for Homes to name a few. These involve adherence to even more stringent high-performing efficiency and whole building and site design standards. They examine more closely sustainable siting, materials, low water, and zero energy use, or even positive energy generation,  holistic thinking, life cycle cost analysis, and more. We are happy to work with you to assess what program is right for you and your project.

We welcome your comments and questions:

Meanwhile, we hope you enjoyed learning more about our Modern Farmhaus prototype design, our design process, and important details. Let us know if you have any questions or comments by clicking on the learn more button below.

If you enjoyed the links to green building programs, materials, and other information and find them helpful do let us know below in the comments section.  We are always looking for helpful information. Don't hesitate to share in the comment section below.  

Want to return to see more of our project portfolio of inspired prototype homes, projects in progress, and completed work? Click on the button below to see a variety of constantly changing examples of our work. As always, feel free to give us a call or send us an email. You can also follow us on Instagram @arocordis_design.

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