Boston, April 22, 2009 – A new Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house designed by Portland, OR architects, D.P. Design, recently took top honors at the Home Builders Association awards, thanks to the elegant way it combines art deco, eco-friendly and aging-in-place design features.
The “Evergreen” house, designed with Graphisoft Archicad software, won the “Best New Home” category at the awards, a particularly impressive feat in a Pacific Northwest region brimming with new innovative architecture.
Evergreen was designed for a mature couple who work from home and plan to make it their final residence. It was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Usonian” homes, and includes art deco details throughout, including a four-foot stepped eave overhang, horizontal rift oak paneling, custom molding, and a see-through fireplace.
Architect Diane Plesset, a Certified Aging-in-Place Specialist, designed the home to provide easy accessibility, comfortable stairs and other smart-aging design features with which the spaces can be easily adapted over time to accommodate the life path of older residents.
The other key design objective was sustainability. The Evergreen house was built with insulated concrete forms, and has energy-efficient radiant heating throughout. The flat roof home is designed to accommodate wind turbines and solar panels with maximum exposure. Custom low-voltage LED lighting illuminates the main living areas, and large dual-glazed windows on all sides of the home offer sufficient ambient light during the day. Sustainable cork flooring was used throughout the home.
Plesset has been designing residences with Archicad for nearly a dozen years. Facing a tight budget and limited timeframe, working with an Archicad building information model (BIM) allowed her to greatly accelerate the design process by enabling frequent collaboration and cost-cutting revisions with owners, the builder and trade contractors.
“Archicad allowed me to build and share a virtual model of the home with all the stakeholders, either in person or through online ‘virtual’ meetings,” she said. “We could rapidly make unlimited revisions without it interrupting the schedule. In the end, we were able to complete the project within 1% of the project’s budget. The result is a home that reflects the older couple’s unique lifestyle and taste, while maintaining the architectural integrity within a reasonable budget.”
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