Ever had a few too many and stumbled up the stairs of your home only to find yourself staring at your neighbor’s identical front door?  Could happen to anybody, right?  With identical, cookie-cutter McMansions proliferating like mosquitoes in a pup tent it’s no wonder America is becoming the land of conformity and home of the bland – another unfortunate reality, many of those big, boxy McMansions are poorly constructed, energy sucking enemies of the environment.   No style and no substance.

Well who would have thought that a modular home might provide an eco-friendly solution to suburbia’s lack of identity, New World Home and Hearst Magazines announced today a partnership for the Country Living Collection of historically inspired “country” modular homes that feature USGBC LEED® certification.

Moving forward by looking back – New World Home – a developer of sustainable housing, has created a line of new green modular homes that are a convergence of historically inspired design, next generation green products and practices and a highly efficient manufacturing process. New World’s  New Old Green Modular, or NOGM, home platform will now feature The Country Living Collection, a series of home designs that will offer homeowners classic, American style in a high performance home that exceeds the building industry’s most stringent green standards.  Goodbye big box.

“The Country Living Green Modular Home Collection offers a range of historically inspired designs that reflect the comfortable, warm and inviting style found in the pages of the magazine. Interior and exterior details hand-selected by the editors of Country Living include signature elements such as open floor plans, porches, fireplaces and oversized windows.”

The homes in the Country Living Green Modular Home Collection range from 1,100 to 2,300 square feet with an average price of $150-$200 per square foot ($165,000-$460,000) excluding land and site costs. Every home can be customized on demand and typically move-in ready, less than 100 days from the start of production.

“New World Home utilizes a proprietary whole-systems design approach to building science that integrates state-of-the-art products and practices from around the world. As a result, homeowners will reduce overall energy consumption by more than 50%, save thousands of gallons of water per year and enjoy superior indoor air quality over an average code-built house,” says Tyler Schmetterer, co-founder of New World Home.

New World Home is currently producing a Country Living Design Center, the first of the collection, in the New York tri-state area scheduled to open in summer 2010.

source: new world home

If you’re selling everything in the home — why not sell the home itself?  Swedish furniture giant Ikea will be introducing its “BoKlok” line of prefabricated houses in the German state of Hesse, with the promise that unlike most of its home furnishings, there will be no assembly required.

Ikea has partnered with building firm Skanska and will develop several different models which will be constructed by German firm Bien-Zenker. The first set of nine row houses will be sold in the Wiesbaden suburb of Auringen on April 17th.

“No customer will have to put their home together themselves with an Allen key,” Bien-Zinker head Philipp Mühlbauer joked.

Later in April, another 30 Ikea row houses and apartments will go on the market in Offenbach, with owners able to move in before year’s end, according to Mühlbauer.  The energy-efficient prefab houses, which sell for between €180,000 and €250,000 (approx. $246K – $340k US), are expected to be allotted by drawing, due to high demand.

“We want to make the process as relaxed as possible for our customers,” Ikea spokesperson Sabine Nold said, adding that further locations include Nuremberg and Hofheim-Langenhain in the Taunus region near Frankfurt.

The BoKlok, or “build clever,” group operates independently, but uses IKEA stores for sales presentations. The company plans to buy plots of land and erect the homes with standard floor plans in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Great Britain.

Models include 84 or 102-square-metre living spaces, in addition to family homes with two, three, or four bedrooms.

source: thelocal.de

Tired of mundane rectangular living?  Think outside the box and live in the round via a portable, prefab shelter dome from Pacific Domes.  They’ve been making these designer geodesic domes for years; the sturdy structures have proven to be impervious to high winds, heavy snows and even the occasional earthquake. Offered in a variety of sizes and customizations.

Want to expand your home, add an in-yard office or small cabin, but light on cash? Add usable, stylish space to your home with one of these small footprint sustainable structures from San Francisco’s Modern Cabana.  These tiny buildings feature:  optimized framing, FSC-certified lumber and siding, bamboo flooring, recycled denim insulation and a waste-reducing manufacturing process.

Most of these prefabricated base units are single room, without bathroom. You can customize the larger models to include a bathroom as well as room dividers.  Those with building experience and a few friends can probably put up one of these in a few days.

It’s recommended that you mount the structure on cement piers.  And the roof, as shipped, is not suitable for supporting heavy snow loads.  Sizes range from 10′ x 12′ to 12′ x 25′ and basic kits prices range from $500 for a dog house, to $31,000 for the largest model (you customize doors, windows, etc. and accessorize from there).  Installation and shipping are extra.

San Francisco’s CleverHomes has created this little one bedroom prefab for those in search of a low maintenance weekend cabin or a guest house for any estranged relatives who might drop in.  The 480 square foot interior design features one bedroom, one bath as well as living, dining and kitchen areas.

The flat roof is great for solar panels, or a green roof or garden.  Siding can be:  reclaimed wood, concrete, metal or stucco.  The Mini also features a 70 square foot deck and bi-fold door.

The CHMini is just one of the many CleverHomes’ designs which typically cost between $200 and $300 per sqare foot depending on the buyer’s choice of finishes, extras and configuration.  CleverHomes estimates that their energy efficient building envelope will save 50% or more on energy costs over a traditional stick-built home.

This eco-friendly beach abode is marketed as a ‘gleaming piece’ of affordable prefab modernism by Australia’s MODABODE.  The first version of the e-BODE was built in 2004 by U.K. architects, Sarah Bickford and Paul Lucas.  The single bedroom unit is priced at something around $115,000 US – for those Australian’s who want a small footprint prefab.

Some features: large windows allow for plenty of natural light, louvred upper windows create cross ventilation and the over-hanging roof protects the unit from the sun.  The home, which features a solar water heater, a rainwater collection system and full coated insulation, easily exceeds Australia’s Building and Sustainability Index energy and water consumption targets.

The home is also offered in a two bedroom configuration. The only site work required is an electrical hook-up and simple foundation pads – creating as little site disruption as possible – the home can be moved or removed relatively easily.  Add solar panels or a wind turbine to get completely off-grid.

Designers from Clemson University started the SEED project to reuse excess shipping containers found around the world.  They take these cargo containers, designed to withstand extreme weather at sea and made of steel, and rethink their purpose.  Why not use the 304 square feet of floor space in these things as housing?  What was once an obsolete hunk of metal is now an extremely solid, weatherproof, insect-resistant, fire proof home.

But wait, you’re thinking, those things are UGLY!  True, in their original form they certainly are, but designers at SEED have set their minds to transforming these giant hunks of metal into light, livable spaces arranged like apartment buildings.

The men and women working at Clemson University have wasted no time in finding practical applications.  They have proposed these SEED containers as a cost effective and sustainable strategy for rebuilding Haiti.  Their design images seem almost surrealist, but it’s just crazy enough that it just might work.

In light of the Haiti earthquake there are tons of ways you can be green and help out.  Donate your cell phones, clothes, and money.  But don’t stop there, educate yourself about the issues in Haiti, why the earthquake was so disastrous, and what the US has done to cause the abject poverty we’re seeing in photographs.  To rebuild Haiti sustainably we have to know what caused the destruction in the first place – only a part of it was the earthquake.

We’ve already listed Rocio Romero’s LV prefab homes among our 5 favorite eco homes and now they’ve gone and created more options for designing your own cost effective green domicile with the introduction of their LV2 line.

The LV2 is a two story add-on that allows you to stack LV Series, (LVS single story) units.  You can now stack any LVS unit on top of any other to create your own custom home.  LV add-ons are custom connections between LVS units, therefore you will need to engage Romero’a design staff to integrate the add-ons when you’re expanding your existing LVS home.  The LV2 is exactly the same square feet and pricing as regular LV kit units.  The design employs traditional construction materials and techniques, so, once delivered, any general contractor can build an LV Home.

Single unit LV home kits start around $37,000 for an 1,159 square foot unit — the units can be customized and combined in a wide variety of combination and styles — with roofing, windows and exterior decks/stairs, site work, building lot, etc. not included.  LV units can be delivered almost anywhere, and because of the nature of the on-site construction, qualify for a traditional mortgage.

Find more info, renderings and designs @ rocioromero.com

Could this innovative material be a big player in the future of green building?  Though a house made of straw may initially sound sketchy, U.K. based ModCell is creating straw bale cladding panels designed to make large-scale, carbon-negative building a commercial reality.

The ModCell system incorporates the excellent thermal insulation qualities of straw bale and hemp construction to form locally made, prefabricated panels.  The resulting structures are built utilizing renewable, locally sourced, carbon sequestering materials creating super-insulated, high-performance, low energy ‘passive’ buildings.  ModCell’s green building products are designed for use in:  offices, schools, residential housing and commercial buildings.

The prefab wall and roof cladding system is designed to be quickly installed and with little waste, creating airtight buildings with thermal performance up to three times higher than current building regulations require.  As a result, in certain climates ModCell buildings can have zero heat requirements — saving money, energy and CO2 emissions.  (more…)

Location, location, location…pictured above is the first prototype house utilizing the Blue Sky Homes Building System.  The home sits on a site 4,000 feet above sea level in the rugged Southern California High Desert and was completed earlier this year in a pretty impressive eight weeks.

The structure is integrated into the landscape on a floating six-legged platform – thus avoiding the need to grade a traditional home pad which would have irreparably damaged the beautiful desert site.

The 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bathroom prototype house was designed by  Palm Springs – based o2 Architecture with the intent of maximizing both the benefits of the Blue Sky Homes Building System and the house’s spectacular location in the Southern California High Desert.

The home’s design is all about steel.  Other than cabinetry, a couple of interior doors and furniture, this house contains no wood at all.

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