Home Made Home

How Los Angeles is bringing high design to the granny flat — while saving time and money Los Angeles has launched a program with over a dozen preapproved designs from top architects for backyard dwellings, cutting the bureaucracy for needed housing.

On the wisdom of vernacular building based in local conditions.

Santiago Pradilla: "Most of What I Learned in University Doesn't Apply to Rural Housing Design"

The Tyee continues its focus on tiny homes.

As Tiny Homes for Homeless Flourish Elsewhere, They’re a Hard Sell in Vancouver | The Tyee City staff dismiss the model, shown to be warmer and safer than tent cities, and ‘a bridge’ to stable living.

As you know, we've been pushing this idea for years, everywhere we can. We have a team ready, willing and able to jump into this. Who has the will, locally, to get on with it?

If We Care about the Homeless, We’ll Build Lots of Tiny Homes, Fast | The Tyee Many US cities are showing us how. Vancouver and other BC cities can’t pretend they don’t know a solution.

First-ever compendium of indigenous technologies provides a powerful toolkit for climate-resilient design - Harvard Graduate School of Design The design field is at an inflection point. It must challenge its repertoire, rethink technology, and begin to see biodiversity as a building block of urban environments. Julia Watson’s lush and meticulous new book, Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, provides a blueprint for sustainable archi...

Some photos of our completed build of The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency deckhouse: a 500 square foot off-grid residence with sustainable systems also designed by Germaine.

Coverage of our current building project.

Cates Park ‘Blue Cabin’ becomes floating artist residency in False Creek | Watch News Videos Online Watch Cates Park ‘Blue Cabin’ becomes floating artist residency in False Creek Video Online, on GlobalNews.ca

We're currently building the deck house for the Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency, hitting the water later this summer: https://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/art-seen-the-blue-cabin-launches-this-summer-as-floating-artist-residency-in-false-creek

Good summary by Michael Geller of the range and status of smaller housing forms discussed at the Small Housing Summit.

In unaffordable Vancouver, we need to start thinking small Small is beautiful. This was the theme of a recent conference organized by Small Housing BC.