Crafting eco-friendly homes

WSTM, June 30, 2007 05:22 AM

When it comes to building a new home more and more people these days are looking for green alternatives.

One California architect is mixing environmental practices with a very old method of building.

It's a strange thing that in 15 years of building homes the house that Paul Melish is most proud of is one he didn't build at all.

"It came from a factory outside of Portland, Oregon. We then had it shipped on four large semis," said Melish.

Melish and his crew built the foundation and he coordinated the giant crane that dropped it onto his site in Marin County, California.

"They built this house in two and a half months in the factory. It would have taken my crew two and a half months to frame the house," said Melish.

Everything from its sustainable bamboo floors to the eco friendly paint job was finished before the house ever arrived in California.

"Everything you see here is shipped, the plumbing was in, the tile was laid, the glazing was in, and the paint's on the wall," said Melish.

It also happens to be one of the area's greenest homes, not just for what went in to it, but also what didn't.

"In a typical job you have these large containers that then take all the material away. We've only had to take three pickup trucks worth of garbage away from this house," said Melish.

The idea of prefab houses isn't a new concept, but their status as an environmentally friendly alternative is.

"I moved to the bay area and my husband and I started looking for a place to live. We couldn't find anything we liked that we could afford and nothing was green," adds architect Michelle Kaufman.

Kaufmann is out to change the old stigma about manufactured homes.

"I think a lot of that has to do with that preconception we have in the U-S, that prefab is substandard because we think of trailer homes," Kaufman explained.

Kaufmann's homes are built with renewable resources, recycled paper countertops, solar power and wind generated cooling.

Also because they're built in a factory there's up to seventy percent less waste.

"It's a really great way to prepackage these green solutions, make it easier for people and make it more affordable for people to go green," said Kaufman.

So far Kaufman has designed more than a dozen homes in the bay area.

She hopes to build ten thousand in the next 15 years while along the way changing the idea that building a green lifestyle takes a lot of work.