We are building an ecological garden at the Brooklyn green show house. The idea is to harmoniously combine various elements – xeriscape, native plants, edible plants, natural pool, animal friendly plants, permaculture, to name a few – so that the garden is both bountiful and natural to the environment. The garden will be a showcase […]
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The book Good House Cheap House: Adventures in Creating an Extraordinary Home at an Everyday Price doesn’t set out to be about green building. It aims to show nicely designed and affordable homes. But it ends up showing good green building as well. The many case studies in the book show a pattern. Firstly all the
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Sheet rock isn’t very green. It requires a lot of heat to make it and the ingredients are not great. I’ve had little luck finding sheet rock alternatives. Plaster and lath is one but the labor costs make it hard to compete with sheet rock. The best I do so far is use salvaged sheet rock.
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One of the things Eco Brooklyn is focused on is eliminating the use of concrete. Concrete is normally used in the following areas of the brownstone: the foundation footings, the cellar floor, front sidewalk. Concrete and its ingredient of cement is not green. It produces massive amounts of CO2. So we are eager to find
It is striking that despite the many green building going on in the US that there still remains some blaring gaps in our knowledge and available products. I encountered another of these gaps recently in my search for a good front door for a Brooklyn Passive House style brownstone. I was looking for something super
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Fans are inherently energy efficient since they reduce your need for an energy hog air conditioner. But for those of us constantly pushing the envelope we want to know what the most energy efficient fan is. Right now my favorite is the Sycamore Fan. The main reason I love it is that it is a classic example
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A client of mine just came back from England raving about her friend’s natural paint company Annie Sloan. Paint, a substance you put onto another surface, usually acts as protection and an aesthetic. Natural paint can be many things but needs to have the same basic elements: a binder, a base and optional color. The
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Broadly speaking there are two kinds of green building books: one looks to the latest scientific innovations for solutions and the other looks to revive ancient techniques. Lets call them the futurists and the traditionalists. In the futurists camp you have high tech, in the traditionalists you have low tech. Futurists design houses with complex
I just uncovered a New York Times article on earthen floors. It is cool because it mentions the person who is consulting with Eco Brooklyn on some earthen floors in Brooklyn and Harlem. Her name is Sukita and she is very knowledgeable in earthen floors. Here are more cool pics. We have done some experimenting
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We did two jobs over the past week on wood floors. They started out really ugly. And they ended up amazing. We finished them with 100% pure tung oil so they are really natural. The first job was to remove some paint that a previous owner, in their infinite and unfathomable intelligence, had painted over
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