I’m sharing a schematic floor plan for a house I was working on, designed with permaculture in mind. I imagined this to be a site built home on a rural property. I hit pause on this idea after getting stuck on a problem which I now don’t recall.
The design follows the flow of a small family, arriving home and unloading groceries. During growing season, they can go to the garden thru the mudroom, transition thru the kitchen with the harvest and wash up in the adjacent bathroom before proceeding to the main living areas of the home.
Your boots and raincoats are hanging on your way to the garden. You can sit on the bench while you remove your fluffy slippers and put on your rainboots. You can walk around to a shed for some yard tools or some firewood. When you come back in, the floor finish does not care that you are wet or muddy, laundry is there and you don’t have to spread the mess past the bathroom. You can put the tomatoes and basil on the kitchen island.
Lighting is abundant in this plan. Lots of softer northern daylight from a deck with a view to the land laid out just outside. The western sun is buffered by your garage and transitional spaces like hallways, laundry and a bathroom to reduce heat transfer to the rest of the home. Wind flow is designed to carry that warmer air thru a shallower part of the plan, and let’s this warm air exit thru the backdoor. In your bedroom, you wake up to the morning sun, with walls laid out to keep that side of the home quiet, with your windows facing out to the east.
The utilities of the home are meant to be laid out for efficiency. I was intending to minimize plumbing lines and ductwork for HVAC. This is for the main house, and excludes any outside structures like sheds that would support other property activities.
It is also designed to be a safe and defensible home, meant to be located in a more rural setting, using Jeff Cooper’s Sconce house concept (link to blog post here). You see the driveway from your kitchen sink, living room sofa or master bedroom. Your guest feels enclosed and seen as they come up to your front door. Your front door swings out and cannot be kicked in. At night, the bedrooms are tucked into one area, with the parents at the entry to the hallway and able to act as gatekeepers, to protect that part of the house should the worst dangers occur.
Reading this now, I plan to get back to refining this design. I cannot recall what stumped me on it and caused me to put my pencil away, to shun it to pages from months back. It still makes a lot of sense to me and I plan to continue developing it.
Alt-Ark‘s goal is to make architecture more permaculture. We seek to empower the creation of forever homes that families can design to match the lives they choose.
Alt-Ark 
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