su libro

home comfort Books about grid-free living, recycled home constructions, havens and retreats, and decorating ideas find their way to our coffee table this winter.
By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Winter 06 Su Casa

Off the Grid, Modern Homes + Alternative Energy, by Lori Ryker, Gibbs Smith Publisher, Layton, UT, 160 pages, hardcover, $29.95.
Redux, Designs that Reuse, Recycle, and Reveal, by Jennifer Roberts, Gibbs Smith Publisher, Layton, UT, 160 pages, hardcover, $29.95.

Two particularly good new books—Off the Grid, by Lori Ryker, and Redux, by Jennifer Roberts—prove that building with an environmental ethic can create homes whose beauty and comfort easily match their conventional counterparts. As getting-started resource guides packed with information and ideas, both of these titles from Gibbs Smith (which has quite an extensive backlist of eco-building titles) make a valuable contribution to the popularization of the green cause without painting it scarily unconventional or just plain weird. These books feature homes you’d like to own.

Ryker’s Off the Grid goes right at energy independence, or at least doable degrees of off-grid living. Describing this as a “think book”—albeit one with a lovely image portfolio—she intends it as “an introduction to the concepts, techniques, and application of environmentally resourceful energy strategies.” (Water, as well, seems to seep into the definition.) The grid she’s talking about is an “almost invisible” web of infrastructure: power and phone lines, telecommunication towers, highways, water and sewer lines, dams—maybe air routes, railroads, cable TV, broadcast TV and radio, and satellites, too? And we’re all caught like flies in the spider web.

A desire to tend the health of the planet provides the rationale for getting off the grid by reducing our use of polluting energy sources, conserving water, and preserving finite and nonrenewable natural resources. Each of the homeowners of these 10 featured projects “has taken the health of the environment as his or her own responsibility.”

And what projects they are, diverse in size, scale, location, architectural approach, aesthetics, energy sources, and (presumably) cost. For years, at least around the hinterlands of the West, off the grid meant rural and remote. As people moved into back-of-beyond homesites—near the Gila Wilderness, for instance, or outside Madrid, New Mexico—they were prohibitively far away to tie into the electric grid or the wire-based phone system of land lines. Water and sewer were strictly do-it-yourself. Living off the grid required a gas generator, propane refrigerator, and maybe a bank of photovoltaic solar cells to power the stereo.

That was 1980.

As it turns out, we did slip through the Y2K scare and its end-is-near predictions of grid collapse. Today Ryker finds off-the-grid homes in New York City; Ontario, Canada; outback Australia; Stuttgart, Germany; suburban California; and way-rural Montana. People are using a range of energy technologies, too: geothermal, wind power, photovoltaics, and microhydropower (like the Hoover Dam, only smaller), plus non-energy technology like rainwater catchment and gray water reclamation.

Unlike some books in this genre, Off the Grid is upfront and realistic about the degree of energy self-sufficiency these homes attain. (The realities of budget and even local building codes prevent some from being 100 percent grid-free.) In fact, the book is so full of information that you can sort through the details and draw your own conclusions about the various approaches. In addition to a readable, informative narrative about each project, Ryker includes information about the energy technology (complete with brand names), how the alternative energy systems are used, how conventional energy sources fit in the mix, building materials, and construction methods. She also includes a floor plan for each and illustrations that help you understand how it all works. A helpful chart at the back gives an at-a-glance comparative summary of the projects and their off-the-grid applications. A resources section provides full contact information for the architects, designers, building contractors, and major systems manufacturers or suppliers.

The pictures are great, too. Make no mistake, these aren’t 1970s-era hippie shacks but rather eminently drool-worthy homes: The archetypal northwoods Minnesota cabin refuge, the northern California stone-and-timber lakeside hideaway, the amazingly extroverted Stuttgart glass house, the fully grid-off’ed Texas hill country limestone retreat… I’ll take one of each.

I came away from Off the Grid with the impression that some highly creative architectural talent has invaded this once-fringe housing genre. Redux carries that impression into a different aspect of green building: using castoff materials, abandoned buildings, and recycled materials. Not only are the homes in Roberts’ book aesthetically uncompromised by their creators’ salvage mentality, but they also just might be improved by it. As Roberts notes, “these are delicious homes,” 11 places that “look great and do good.” Green doesn’t have to look different—but sometimes it does, with spectacular results. The retrofit of an Illinois Elks Lodge into affordable apartments and the Brooklyn ice house conversion don’t trumpet their “difference,” while the Nevada mountain home and the Los Angeles scrap-yard home of repurposed cargo containers challenge the norm in striking and interesting ways.

What sets them all apart, of course, is the salvaged, the repurposed, the recycled content. Here you’ll find homes that reuse roof slate as floor tiles, that resurrect timbers from a demolished mill, make countertops of recycled glass, dredge logs from river bottoms for structural members, lay down planks from brewery vats as floorboards, or even hang a dozen Volvo hatchbacks to form an utterly post-modern privacy fence.

Chapters cover renovation (with a focus on energy efficiency, salvaging, and finding good old stuff), adaptation (restorations, plus what to avoid), and new construction (with an emphasis on ecologically smart design, materials, and green architects). The projects slot into these categories.

Roberts tells the stories of each project in an engaging narrative accompanied by shorter accounts of related ideas, practical tips, helpful resources, and a quick-find lists of reuse strategies and other green applications.

Redux and Off the Grid are both smart books. They might even change the way you think about the whole sustainable-building movement, which—from the evidence here—has finally shed its Birkenstocks-and-granola image for a more mainstream persona, leaping from grunge to high-style in a single bound.

Haven, Cozy Hideaways and Dream Retreats, by Allison Serrell, photographs by Meredith Heuer, Chronicle Books, San Franciso, 176 pages, 225 color photographs, hardcover, $45.

Haven is a getaway book. Armchair escapism has broad appeal, and when an author links it to the huddled comforts of a domestic retreat—a place you might actually go find for yourself—you have a book that satisfies multiple cravings. Now that’s market position.

Through 20 vignettes of words and photos, author Allison Serrell and shooter Meredith Heuer tour the reader through a wide range of homes that one way or another—the criteria are never explicitly revealed—qualify as domestic havens.

“These structures celebrate the sensation of simply being away from it all, escaping to a private world,” Serrell writes in the introduction. “They honor simple living with their proximity to nature and their use of natural materials. Their proportions are modest, but light and views are plentiful, and comfort is king.”

The headline of the introduction asks rhetorically, “Why has the idea of escape become so cherished?” Well, 9/11, foreign wars of uncertain conclusion, and rampant hurricanes provide strong clues. In the era of Homeland Security and military-style SUVs as personal transportation, the personal retreat can feel like a psychological necessity. We already needed home in its richest connotations; now we need sanctuary.

Escaping into these pages, then, is an understandable quest for refuge. As one who loves the backyard hut, the weekend getaway cabin, and the private hermitage in all their permutations, I found Haven an interesting variation on the theme. The book’s chosen subjects definitely skew toward the more formal and elaborately structured end of the spectrum of retreats, while still providing enough diversity to keep you turning pages.

Take the neoclassical, 1840s-era church appropriated by an artist as a working studio, for instance. With its monumental Ionic columns, stained glass windows, and cavernous interior, this “artist’s sanctuary” contrasts strongly with the simple desert cabin on the following pages, a spare 1950s exercise in modernist minimalism graced by easy flowing transitions between indoors and out. Love it! I love the “Desert Modern” casita elsewhere in the book even more. The amazing “Waterfall Home,” with its exquisite setting almost on a tumbling cataract and surrounded by a lovely mixed forest, conjures not only Frank Lloyd Wright but also, more importantly for the book’s audience, transcendent domestic serenity. If only—

Modernism fares well in Haven. In fact, most of the photos enjoy a Dwell magazine sensibility, a stark realism and cool palette that can feel drained of earth tones or sun-tinted highlights. Oh, right: they’re not in New Mexico. So where are these retreats? Visual cues and clues in the author’s bio—Serrell writes a column for the San Francisco Chronicle home section—strongly suggest California, though Mexico and the Mediterranean might also be making cameos in the book. I’m such an advocate of place-centered architecture that the omission of each haven’s location (location, location) seemed needlessly prudish. Come on, at least tell us the state! Without such detail, the places seem eerily unhooked from reality, as if they exist in some generic TV land. Maybe that was the intent: the homes’ very anonymity reinforces the message that they occupy some Platonic plane of domestic idealism. Cool.

In any case, Haven makes a fine if-I-won-the-lottery dream book. And not every house is extravagant or costly beyond reach, though their settings often suggest exclusivity. And while Serrell doesn’t offer up such profane, mundane details as sales price or per-square-foot cost, many of these lovely retreats could be built at prices competitive with more conventional homes. It’s not the size of the wall that matters in building the one-of-a-kind retreat but rather the daring of imagination.

Decorating Idea Book, by Heather Paper, The Taunton Press, Newtown, CT, 320 pages, 500 color photographs, 30 drawings, paperback, $24,95.

From angular modernism to quaint country, from the almost-stark simplicity of beige on cream to tremendous surges of primary colors, from overstuffed armchairs to a wood and steel workbench, Heather Paper has packaged a fair if still circumscribed range of interior design examples into her Decorating Idea Book. Like all Taunton Home titles, this one packs in a wide selection of photos of uniform quality, with clear, informative captions, focused sidebars, and floor plans.

The design tastes that Paper represents, though, span a kind of J-to-Q middle of the alphabet range, neither veering into Gen-X retro edginess nor—whew!—kitschy McMansion melodrama. You’d feel comfortable putting up your parents for the weekend in any one of these homes, and you might well choose some of them for your own. But forget hosting a house concert or a planning session for next year’s Burning Man festival. These places aren’t that cool. And Southwest style? Look somewhere else. The sensibility derives strictly from the right-hand side of the U.S. map.

Still, you can crib a hundred ideas from a book like this. At Su Casa, we continually field questions about color (color, and more color), window treatments, how to mix furniture styles, and the like. Paper drills deep into them all. Take beds, for instance. In 13 heavily illustrated pages, she tours through bed types—not just queen or king, but sleigh, four-poster, shortened four-poster, metal, canopy, and daybeds. Plus headboards and the thread count of sheets, the exact dimensions of mattress sizes, and advice on picking a pillow. Ever wonder what to call the different kinds of feet and legs on tables? Paper names them, with illustrations. In fact, her explanations of various terms will help you talk to your decorator in her language or tell the salesman at the home-furnishing store exactly what you’re looking for.

What’s not to like about Decorating Idea Book? Unfortunately, it provides no resources section, where readers can find where to buy what they see, how to contact designers, or where to find more information. The closest thing to reference information is the photo credit section, but you won’t find much more than a designer’s name or photographer’s website address.

Another shortcoming is the book’s utter ignorance of green, as in ecological, sustainably produced, health-enhancing, or energy-efficient products. These days, an awareness of the health effects of chemicals in paint, for instance, or the ecological impact of lumber cut from old-growth forest, has encouraged consumers to add green credentials to their list of criteria in home construction and furnishings. Paper’s discussion of paint makes no mention of the potential hazards from volatile organic compounds in most paints. That oversight seems pretty old school.

Maybe old school is comforting these days. Like Haven (reviewed above), Decorating Idea Book is a comfort book in the way a bowl of chicken noodle soup is a comfort food. The images are consistently soothing, nonthreatening, inoffensive, and reassuring, as if to say it’s all right to be an American with nice things in your house.