Blog/News

Local geology, climate, our living habits, and the house’s legacy garden collided to make the Water Petal the biggest hurdle for us to leap. The last in our series about the challenges of meeting LBC’s Water Petal…

Setting up the system for drinking our rainwater was simple. But our path to LBC certification for the house’s water petal proved complicated.  It followed a winding road not because Biohabitats missed something.  Pete and Crystal did great work on the design. And it wasn’t because the end solution was so complex.  The journey was bendy for two important reasons: 1. We were setting a very high bar to generate all our own water for the house, even during the Northwest’s dry months and 2. We were trying to create a water solution that respected the existing forest garden…

As ecological engineers and designers, we see Loom House not as a “site,” but as a part of the Bainbridge Island landscape and the interconnected, ecological systems and communities that enliven it. Like all built structures, it is a place that exists within and has an impact on its unique watershed.We believe that impact can be positive…

In the Pacific Northwest, how hard can it be for a house to harvest all its own water? Apparently, plenty hard.  Despite the steady rain nine months a year, in the summer we go dry for three months. This feast and famine makes the politics of water in this oft-soaked region more complicated than we expected…

“Now on to something much, much more interesting and intriguing than art … Sewage!” That’s how a Bainbridge City Council member introduced an ordinance we had worked on to let Bainbridge homes and buildings handle wastewater in a way that lessens the burden on the Island’s infrastructure while helping to protect our drinking water supply and our local ecology…

Saving a vintage home – adapting the old to the new – is itself the essence of conservation…

Remodeling a house as a Living Building can require some big moves, such as installing solar panels or triple-pane windows.  But, then, we can engineer the world’s tightest building envelope, and defeat all that work by neglecting a hole some place in the wall or roof just the size of a quarter. It’s the small, day-to-day construction methods that can make or break a project.  

The topic is spray foam insulation. On the surface, it sounds like a dull subject. Things get more interesting, however, when you consider the fact that spray foam is the building industry’s version of a Faustian bargain:  it does an amazingly effective and low-cost job of providing insulation that reduces energy bills, but it is one of the most toxic, greenhouse-gas producing products known…

People often want to know why we are remodeling Loom House to such a high standard of green.  The short answer is that we want our living/work space and how we spend our time and money to match our values. We are privileged to attempt this on a scale like Loom House. 

And there are many ways for people to take action on different scales -- all of them honorable. That raises a straightforward question: what will it take for us all link our beliefs and behaviors, for people to match their values with their resources – in any way they can?

At our historic Loom House job site on Bainbridge Island, we are finding a better way – a kinder, environmentally conscious method of dealing with construction waste. At this Living Building Challenge remodel, our team is taking the time to separate out untreated waste pieces – those without coating, paint or preservative – and divert them to recyclers, who will turn these scraps into useful biomass or mulch…

Loom House is a mid-century modern home with an architectural style identified by expansive amounts of glass, expressive structure and materials that extend from inside out. This is inherently problematic from an energy efficiency standpoint. Updating the home to meet high-performance goals largely focused on improving overall assemblies (the walls, roof and floors), including triple-pane insulated glass and an effort to eliminate thermal bridging…

Energy independence is a key goal of the Living Building Challenge – projects must generate 105 percent of their own power using renewable sources, and provide onsite storage for system resiliency. It’s called net-positive energy, and it’s a very high bar to reach.  The Loom House on Bainbridge Island is up to the challenge…

As we approach this year’s Thanksgiving celebration we cannot help but look forward to 2019’s holiday with a dream of how the Loom House owners will be able to welcome their family around their new table. The idea of welcoming was one of the first items addressed in the Loom design when the project began. Before the renovation, there was no clear path to enter the home and no delineation of the difference between the north and south houses…

Bringing an older home up to the rigorous standards of the Living Building Challenge meant we have to demonstrate exceptional concern for the environment. That care extended to the landscape , where a beautiful Chinese dogwood (Cornus kousa) was growing in the footprint of where the new carport is being built. The solution: move the tree…