On the coast of South Carolina sits a beautiful little community of amazingly high performance homes. Called Bryant Park Cottages, it includes twelve homes varying in size from 700 to 1700 square feet, and living in small houses with small building envelopes is one of the best ways to save energy. Since the seventies, homes have become more efficient because of things like attention to air sealing, more and better insulation, and higher efficiency heating and cooling systems. Yet, the increased efficiency hasn't led to conservation because the efficiency dividend was spent on increasing size. We've dropped the kilowatt-hours per square foot and jacked up the square footage, resulting in no savings.
High Performance Homes
In the spring of 2001, I bought a piece of land in the country. It didn't have a house on it, so I switched into high gear to design a new home and prepare for construction. I took a homebuilding workshop at the Southface Energy Institute in Atlanta. I started poring over books and magazines and sketching plans. And I looked into the permitting issues to find out how far they'd let me go here.