A great game I like to play when thinking about real estate and the future is to dream about your ultimate abode. Sure this might never happen but this is the right time to put these thoughts together. For me these are a few of the things I dream of.

First the building site, I want to be here in the rolling hills or Amador County, specifically Jackson Valley, below Lake Amador, This area has a good selection of five to ten acre parcels (although they don’t come on the market very often) with gentle progressively higher hills stacking up from a wide low valley with a year round stream wandering down the middle. Studded with oaks and waving grass. The perfect spot would be on the second rise from the road, on the North side of the valley, this will give privacy, a great longer view of the valley and surrounding hills but at the same time offer easy access and space for us to keep animals and work up a small biodynamic garden.

Being on the North side of the valley offers great Southern exposure for photo voltaic, solar thermal, and passive solar collection. The big oaks and digger pines work very well for seasonal passive solar benefits. The big pines tend to be rather bare on the lower parts but they are tall and mostly evergreen, the oaks grow wider and lower and they drop their leaves in the fall. This combination of local native trees, offers low angle sun shine for the winter and high and low angle shade in the summer. The fact that they are drought tolerant is also a huge plus.

Now the House itself: even though I don’t like concrete all that much, I will probably use quite a bit of it in the floor and foundation, with urbanite (recycled chunks of concrete) reinforcement, extra thick monolithic slab on the southern side on the house under the windows as a heat sink for the big South facing windows and maybe slab for the whole house, although I do like a crawl space for access and in our plan all of the plumbing is toward the North side of the house. In the rooms with floors that are not inlaid, ground, and polished concrete, I dream of using imported Irish bog oak, even though it is not very green due to the staggering transport and production costs. Use of this “found wood” does leave trees standing that would otherwise be cut. I will go into my Bog Oak fixation in some later post. Other great options for my floors are bamboo and more to my liking, steamed, and flattened oak from used wine barrels. These would be kept as un-refinished as possible, wine stains and printing left on and sealed with oils and wax. Like these from Fontenay Wood products.

The frame of the house is built “in the Reds”; thick wall structural steel like you would see in a high-rise. Although it has high embodied energy, the fact that steel is one of the most recyclable building materials and the usable lifespan is substantially longer than that of wood, combined to make up for the energy and cost. That structure will support an anodized steel roof (rated at something like 80 years, but probably with a life of double that) with a 8 inches of recycled denim insulation underneath, and thin film photovoltaic system on top. All of that to cover Straw bale infill exterior walls covered in two coats of local earthen plaster and a finish coat of lime plaster. The interior walls will be easily modified, as the steel frame will be the main support for everything. I will try wattle and daub hand plastered between green stripped and waxed scrub oak trunks for interior walls, if I can convince my wife and the county of the technique. If not keiri board, bamboo and even drywall are all choices.

Building with non-load baring straw bales gives amazing adaptability for things like “oops” custom windows; Habitat (for humanity) ReStore sells many brand new custom windows and even sets of windows that were miss-ordered and are an inch or two off from what the contractor needed for some job. In a stick built house that means “order a new set of windows”, in my straw bale house that means “save enough money to heat and cool the house for a year”, and use reject, but top quality materials, not to mention helping Habitat for humanity. Win-Win-Win!

Modular, local, handmade and long life are to goals of most of the large items in the house, springing for top quality details that will last saves money, time and resources in the long run. Inside the house, long lasting energy and water efficient appliances, all energystar rated. Each fed from a grid connected PV electric system, gas boosted (tankless, boost) solar water heating system, copper plumbing for longevity and health, bathroom sinks, tubs and showers running into a grey-water irrigation system.

Many concepts from Alexander and team’s A Pattern Language and both Western classic and Feng Shui ideas will be blended in the design of the home, with concepts like “light on two sides of every room”, “sunny place”, “six foot balcony”, “cascade of roofs”, the golden ratio, energy flow, and balance all being taken into account. This will not be a huge house, we are looking at about 1800 square feet, and we would like to actually shrink that down by a few hundred. But we are not perfect, we have many far flung friends and family, so guest space even given double duty as office space, still takes, well space.

Things like an outdoor kitchen, masonry fireplace, wood fired hot tub, and master bedroom with a sliding glass door for the rollout bed (I love sleeping under the stars) are a few of the add-on’s we plan.

We will have a big workshop/studio. Probably detached out behind the house, I tend to have large hobbies and the tools to work on those hobbies need space too. This will most likely be a semi-finished poll barn with some finished rooms inside for the more controlled environment work. This is where the bio-diesel set up will be.

My wife is a horse lover, and I like them too, so we will probably have some space set aside for a couple of them. I am excited by the idea of a “biodynamic garden”, that is as much as possible, a closed system farm. A couple of cows, a bunch of chickens, multiple small pastures and movable chicken coops. The cows eat the grass, the chickens spread the bovine “gifts” and remove bugs and undigested parts, also adding high nitrogen fertilizer that in turn feeds the grass, I’m not sure that I’m ready to commit to milking but I do like eggs and we have a wonderful local butcher in the area. Veggies in a greenhouse with rabbits to process the trimmings into high nitrogen compost, for the veggies. You see the trick is to get as close as you can to a closed loop adding as little to the game as possible.

I don’t have a clue what Brad Pitt will turn up in his search for a green (Or Pink for his PINK project in New Orleans) lifestyle, but this is a glimpse of what I want to do for mine. Needless to say, if I ever actually get there I