The Top 10 Environmental Home Design Ideas

ENERGY EFFICIENCY IN NEW HOME BUILDS IS WIDELY RECOGNIZED AS IMPORTANT

Energy efficiency in new home builds is widely recognized as important, and an increasing number of owners of newly built luxury homes have focused much of their attention on environmental home design ideas, optimizing the environmental friendliness of their homes from start to finish.

TOP 10 ECO-FRIENDLY HOUSE IDEAS 

The following list contains the top ten industry-leading, eco-friendly house ideas, all of which we are proud to incorporate into our new builds and renovations for our clients.

1. Protect The Environment: Reducing demand for electricity, gas, and water means that your home can do more with less and place a smaller burden on your environment.  

2. Improve Indoor Air Quality: Current construction and design approaches reduce emissions from commonly used building and finishing materials, resulting in better indoor air quality. 

3. Enrich Occupant Health and Comfort: Increasingly advanced and efficient allergen filters and humidifiers/dehumidifiers built into the air circulation system contribute to greater respiratory health within the home. 

4. Realize Energy Efficiency: Increases in energy efficiency are realized today both inside the home through updated technology in everything from expandable foam insulation to Energy Star-rated appliances, and outside the home with strategically selected and located landscaping vegetation. 

5. Enhance Materials Efficiency: Better quality materials and the highest quality craftsmanship lead to the best efficiency in the long term, delaying by many more years the need for replacements and repairs that are common to homes not built with the optimum labor and materials. 

6. Achieve Water Heating Efficiency: The use of on-demand water heaters, rather than those that maintain the temperature of a particular volume of water, is a current leading example of energy efficiency in the home. 

7. Conserve Water: Water conservation is another key feature of a green home, achieved with the use of low- or variable-flow toilets, and sprinkler systems with sensors that help minimize water waste. 

8. Promote Sustainability: New net-zero and zero-energy homes promote sustainability as they can feed electricity back into the utility grid and result in no energy costs on an annual basis. 

9. Use a Minimum of Natural Resources: The reduction of burden on the environment that results from using solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, and on-demand hot water heaters, contributes to the sustainability of your green home. It also reduces your monthly expenses and your demand for natural resources. 

10. Optimize Operation while Minimizing Maintenance and Maximizing Value: An initial investment of 2% of your building costs into green/sustainable building techniques has been shown to yield savings more than 10 times the original investment. Such a home retains, and even increases, in value at a higher rate than a non-‘green’ home over the long run, yielding a greater return on overall investment for the homeowner. 

HOW WE DO IT AND DO IT WELL… 

We at Front Light Building Company understand the impact we can make by improving home quality and reducing maintenance needs while reducing the net operating cost of a home. By addressing specific design considerations and materials early in the build process, we minimize the utility load on the home. We also understand the importance that our clients place on environmentally friendly practices and materials in their new builds. 

We achieve the reduction of energy, or even net-zero energy consumption, and the implementation of all the environmentally friendly aspects of construction in our builds by first listening to and understanding our client’s environmental interests and green goals for the construction of their new home. Then we carefully consider the orientation of the home on the building site as well as the inclusion of the various interior systems and materials to achieve our homeowners’ plans. 

As Certified Green Professionals (CGP), our team believes in being environmentally sensitive and mindful of the impact of our material choices on the earth’s limited natural resources.