04061 Guidelines for dwelling design

We shape our homes and then our homes shape us. — Winston Churchill

Permaculture is about holistic design. The integration of beneficial connections is a primary goal. The design of your dwelling is one of the places in your life where the integration of beneficial connections (and the elimination of negative connections) is critical. A successful dwelling involves many different systems. Careful design is necessary to ensure that the dwelling works well for all who live there. To take a concept from the Deep Ecology folks –

The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent worth) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great. http://www.deepecology.org/platform.htm

In other words . . . You want a dwelling that cares for people, cares for the planet, and has a care for the future. That’s why you’re reading this.

It doesn’t matter if we talk about an apartment or condominium in a multistory building or a house on an inner-city plot or a townhouse or any other kind of housing found in a modern city. Any kind of dwelling can care for people, care for the planet, and have a care for the future, as long as you design in accordance with the context of the dwelling and its neighborhood in the city.

As with anything else in permaculture, start with wherever you are. Then you do what you can, with what you have, where you are. If you live in a college dormitory, your design for a dwelling space will be different from what you will need when you are ready to move to a house or apartment off-campus. So wherever you are in your life, take what you can productively use from this discussion, and file the rest for future evolutions and migrations in your life.

Don’t build a new house. Don’t buy a new house.

There is plenty of housing already built. You don’t need to build a new house. Most people who want to build have numerous reasons why it is important for them to build a new house. However, a new house cannot care as well for people, for the planet, or the future, as can existing construction because it involves considerable energy embodied in the new buildings materials involved with the project . Remodeling is the true frontier of more sustainable living. Of course, eco-friendly remodeling requires that we be judicious in your use of resources and avoid extravagances like the $50,000 kitchen and the $20,000 bathroom. For those prices, many homes could be renovated to meet the Passive House standards described in the chapter on energy conservation for homeowners.

Besides eco-friendly remodeling of existing houses, a second frontier in urban housing is repurposing existing commercial or industrial buildings for residential purposes.

Given the expected continued movement from rural to urban areas, and the on-going relocations of populations within countries, it may not be possible to actually avoid all new housing construction, but new housing should be the last option, never the first.

The greenest house is the house that never gets built.

Don’t live in too much house.

Big houses bring big bills with them.

More house = more materials = more embodied energy.

More house = more operating energy = more fossil fuel dependency and more emissions that drive global climate change.

More house = more money to buy or rent and more money for property taxes.

If you have a big space, add more people! Aim for maybe 250-400 square feet per person as a rule of thumb for household space.

Live in a densely populated neighborhood.

Densely populated neighborhoods use less energy per capita than the less dense suburbs and rural areas. OK, not everybody can move to a densely populated neighborhood. Laws prevent people from evolving their neighborhoods in more sustainable directions. All of us can work to increase the density of the neighborhoods where we do live.

“Densely populated” does not necessarily mean tall high-rise apartment buildings. Li live in a densely populated neighborhood. It is a combination of individual houses set closely together on small plots (about 1/7th of an acre per house, with enough room between them for a driveway), together with duplexes, four-plexes, and small apartment buildings with eight to twelve units. Many of the houses have one or two garage or backyard apartments. Most of the buildings were constructed from 1910 through the early 1930s. It is a livable neighborhood where people from a diversity of races, cultures, and economic status live together.

In areas presently zoned for single family housing, one permaculture improvement would be to change the laws so that householders can add small garage, attic, basement, and backyard apartments. Note that this isn’t the advocacy of a big government program to build “affordable” housing. It is simply a matter of getting government out of the way, protecting the rights of the homeowners to use and profit from their property, and then letting spontaneous order have its way. It is a rebuke to the Nanny State dictates of the current regime of zoning regulations that prevent homeowners from adding small garage, attic, and basement apartments to their properties.

If you have extra bedrooms, consider taking in a boarder/roommate. This brings in some income as well as improving the density of the local population. It spreads your base household energy usage over more people, resulting in a lower per capita energy use in your household, even if adding some new people increases the total usage.

The systems of your dwelling should be well integrated and beneficially connected with each other. Stack functions and be redundant.

The systems of your house include —

  • Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC)
  • Building walls, floors, foundation, roof (structure)
  • Energy supplies
  • Plumbing and water management (includes humanure and rainwater harvesting)
  • Access (doors, sidewalks, driveways)

The dwelling’s functions include:

  • Food storage, preparation, and consumption
  • Sleeping
  • Entertainment and Communications, maybe some group gatherings
  • Storage

None of these systems and functions work in isolation from the others. They should work together so that the house functions can be carried on in comfort and at a minimum of energy expense. Often, this isn’t what happens. That’s why we encounter problems:

  • Areas of the house are always either too hot or too cold, rarely comfortable.
  • High levels of noxious chemicals like formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds.
  • Water leaks (roofs, pipes, doors, etc.)
  • Mold
  • Pest infestations
  • High humidity
  • Noxious odors
  • High utility bills
  • Cracks in walls and foundations
  • Excess noise
  • Infiltration of dirt

If your dwelling has problems like this, they won’t get better by themselves. There is no need to resign yourself to just suffering through whatever issues your dwelling has. Instead, work to diagnose the problem(s). You may need to consult experts or the solutions may be obvious. Whatever the case may be, don’t let problems with your dwelling’s structure and systems languish. They will get worse with time, eventually costing even more than their resolution would cost now. Problems need to be resolved or mitigated as much as possible given the circumstances (money, time, materials, etc.)

The more dangerous the problem, the more urgent the solution.

The more beneficial connections among the house’s systems, the more resilient, persistent, and constant the dwelling will be in the face of the challenges of the coming years.

For example . . . A passive solar sun porch:

  • Provides space for winter food production (micro-greens, herbs),
  • Is part of the house’s passive ventilation system,
  • Provides heat to the rest of the house during the winter,
  • Keeps the wind and wet out (it serves as a buffer zone between the south wall of the inhabited portion of the house and the weather outside),
  • Provides a support surface for a summer trellis with vines which creates a shady exterior for the windows during the heat of the summer and (depending on the kind of vine) may provide some food production.

A screened porch area:

  • Provides a shady place for a summer kitchen, which keeps the heat and humidity of cooking out of the house, this means a more comfortable house and lower energy bills for AC.
  • Acts as a buffer zone between the exterior climate and the wall of the house.
  • Provides a shaded area protected from the elements for an entry doorway into the house.
  • Is a nice place to sit on a cool summer evening.
  • Covering the screened porch areas with storm windows during the winter, provides more buffer zone for the walls AND additional passive solar heat collection areas. If you can't afford storm windows right now, plastic works.
  • Could be a support for perennial climbing vines like grapes that would provide more shade during the summer.
  • Insulation, as part of a whole house energy conservation system
  • Buffers the interior from the extremes of the outside climate, making it easier to stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter without excessive fossil fuel abuse.
  • Insulates the interior from the noise of the outside world.
  • Reduces the monthly cost of energy. Less money for energy = more money for other important household projects.
  • Because the interior of the house experiences fewer wild swings of temperatures, there is less stress on the materials of the house envelope inside of the insulation and that contributes to durability.
  • Helps eliminate drafts which is another source of lower fossil fuel abuse in the household.

There should be many beneficial connections between you, your dwelling and the surrounding geography and community.

The previous section discussed beneficial connections within the house. But no dwelling is an island by itself. Beneficial connections between you, your dwelling, and the surrounding geography and community are good for resilience and for the development of community.

Reduced fossil fuel abuse = less pressure on the development of new fossil fuel sources and less depletion of existing resources and fewer carbon emissions to drive

Reduced water use = less pressure on the development of new water sources and less depletion of existing resources.

More consumption of local foods — both from on-site food production and from patronizing local farms — = more economic resilience.

Rainwater harvesting = less storm water runoff from your property and more water retained on site to nourish vegetation. Using rainwater for irrigation means less money spent with the local water utility.

The allocation of space in a dwelling is a reflection of the priorities of the persons who live there.

One of the questions about shelter is — "How do we allocate the space in our house?". In the United States, we often think we need a living room, a dining room, a family room, kitchen, bedrooms, and bathrooms. We need a utility room, a garage, and maybe additional storage. Add a basement and an attic. Then we go out and rent a storage unit elsewhere because we have so much stuff it won’t fit into our house.

When I grew up on a farm in southwest Oklahoma, the living room was the family room. There was a separate small dining room, but we ate in the kitchen except on holidays.

When we became more prosperous and moved into town, we had a living room and a family room. The living room was rarely used by anyone other than my sister and I, since that was the location of the piano, and we both had to practice the piano every day. Other than that, if we had visitors from out of town, that is where we would sit and visit with them. Everything happened in the family room. It was next to the kitchen, had the dining area, and was the largest room in the house.

The allocation of space in a dwelling is a reflection of the priorities and lifestyles of the persons who live there.

If a household doesn’t do much cooking, a smaller kitchen works well. On the other hand, if you prepare most meals in-house and there is considerable home processing of food, you need a larger kitchen area. Alternatively, other areas of the dwelling can be temporarily repurposed for food processing purposes during such periods.

Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

Our house has a north-south axis. Anyone involved with passive solar design would say “that’s not the optimum orientation.” We didn’t let the fact that we weren’t in a perfect situation stop us from successfully renovating our house to incorporate a passive solar sun porch which has literally given us free heat since 2005.

One of the tragedies we face is that there has been an almost total collapse in the cross-generational transmission of important knowledge about how to live in a solar economy. As a result, entire cities have been constructed with little or no regard to the most basic issues of solar orientation. We don’t have enough resources to reconstruct all of our cities and small towns — we can’t afford that. We can do what we can, with the buildings we have, in the locations we inhabit.

The type of housing is only of marginal concern to these principles. It doesn’t matter whether you live in a college dormitory, an apartment in a building, in a house on a city lot, or a town home, or any one of the other types of urban housing. The design goal is to maximize the opportunities and beneficial connections that you have with the building you have and to solve or mitigate any problems the housing unit has.

In pursuit of that goal, we do what we can, with what we have, where we are. If we can't make the perfect choice, we make a better choice. If we can't make a better choice, we make a good choice. If we can't make a good choice, we try to avoid making a bad choice. Incremental changes over time contribute to a lifestyle that cares for people, cares for the planet, and cares for the future.