Quality modern furniture and contemporary design is what you have come to expect from Exclusively Home. Home design and interior decoration to make home a better place to live. Lighting fixtures and use of light in contemporary design is an element of extreme importance. (more…)
This spring, Kate and Brent Halfwassen plan to build a storage shed with a green roof behind their 1,600-square-foot 1890 Victorian home in Riverwest. Because the roof is level with an adjacent slope and can hold 165 pounds per square foot, it will double as a play space.
“A lot of the homes in Riverwest are like that and can do something similar. Kids could look at it as a tree house and parents as a greenhouse,” Kate Halfwassen says.
Benefits of green roofs include reduced stormwater runoff, better heat insulation and reduced greenhouse gases through the plantings. But the Halfwassens also believe that the garden roof reclaims a slice of the urban landscape and serves up a chance to practice sustainable agriculture in an unlikely spot in an unlikely locale. (more…)
It’s the second most used area in the house — right after the kitchen — but is oddly reminiscent of your college dorm room. It’s a hub of household activity — home management tasks, kids’ school stuff, take-home work from your day job — all stored and filed in those ugly cardboard boxes. It’s wired — high speed Internet, a snappy new computer, a color printer — along with a nest of wiring all in a mess at your feet. The rest of your house looks great but your home office looks, well, neglected. Isn’t it time to do something about it? (more…)
They aimed for silver, will likely get gold – and in the process, ended up with a prestigious Innovation in Architecture Award from the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada.
That’s a quick summary of the accomplishments Manasc Isaac Architects Ltd. of Edmonton chalked up through its work on the $28-million Greenstone government of Canada building in Yellowknife, N.W.T.
Designed in its geographic context and reflecting the city’s mining heritage, the building is touted as the first structure north of the 60th parallel to achieve gold status via the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program established by the Canada Green Building Council.
With that certification process not quite complete, partner Richard Isaac stops short of saying the gold standard is in the bag. But he will say the firm surpassed its initial aim of silver certification – and has more than enough “points” for gold status.
Isaac also admits that a booming economy means the firm, well-known for its focus on energy-efficient designs and healthy workplaces, is “so busy that we actually don’t take on projects anymore with clients that don’t have an interest in sustainability.”
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It may have been an overexposure to early Frank Lloyd Wright, or perhaps too much time spent in boats, but when I was young, and until very recently, I was horrified by furniture. I always thought that a perfect domestic architecture would be heavy on the built-ins. Shelves, benches, various seats and berths—these were the things necessary to finish a space, to tune it for living, to show at least that the designer was not entirely ignorant of how and by whom a house would be used. Also to anchor it. An uncle of mine lived for many years in a very cool Anglo-built adobe in Taos, New Mexico. At the center of the main space was a large circular pit, dug out of the ground and contoured for sitting: a brutal sunken living room, it seemed so much more profound than the loose, impermanent wooden furniture orbiting all around it, sliding this way and that, imported things ready to take up any position, or be replaced. (more…)
