The benefits of natural daylighting in a home or office can’t be over expressed.  Aside from the obvious energy-savings daylighting can offer a bit of drama, energy and add to ones cheerful disposition. The United States Green Building Council (USGBC) has documented increased worker productivity and a reduction in employee absenteeism in it’s LEED Certified buildings that has enhanced daylighting features.

Seattle home builder Martha Rose takes daylighting and interior lighting to a whole new level in her latest new homes in Seattle, City Cabins.  Maximizing daylighting with strategic placement of windows to allow the natural light to filter into the living spaces, one of the key elements are the 9’ tall ceilings which allow the windows to be placed six inches higher allowing greater depth of natural light into the living areas.

When the sun goes down the homes come alive with well thought-out ambient, task, way-finding and accent lighting.  The open stairways are well lite, using George Kovas’ wall sconces that direct light upward illuminating the tall ceilings as well as casting a soft light downward defining the wood slab steps.  The kitchen features 3 Hudson Bay pendant lights that offer the rare trifecta of lighting ambient, task and accent lighting perfect for a kitchen that looks more like a living area than a food prep area.

The advance lighting package allows the homeowners to easily transition from dinner to after dinner by way of ambient style lighting with undercounter LED lighting and a custom designed dining room fixture that is also a great transitional piece.  The custom fixture is made from a 4’ piece of apple wood (same as the kitchen cabinets) shaped into an artist palette.  Suspended from the ceiling wrapped in stainless steel, the palette shaped fixture takes on a bit of a commercial look while helping to define the dining space from the living room and kitchen areas.  The fixture has a solar tube coming through it surrounded by 7 LED micro-spot lights which can be directed to showcase or to accent.

All of the lighting is eco-friendly energy saving CFL and LED bulbs which use less electricity, last longer than regular light bulbs and put out minimal heat.

The two homes are currently listed for sale, for more information contact Adrian Willanger, 206 909-7536

Related posts:

1. People-centric Homes in Seattle near completion (9.8)
2. Invest In Seattle Green Real Estate and Reduce Your Electricity Bills (9.4)
3. Tips To Help You Find Hi-Performance Houses In Seattle (8.9)
4. Get your kitchen ready to help sell your Seattle home (8.3)
5. Stainless in Seattle (7.9)

The costs to build a green home can add a 3-10% premium on to building costs; the more experienced builders can keep these costs at the lower end with experienced subs familiar with green construction techniques, improved building efficiencies and knowing what the hot buttons are for buyers.

The other part is how to reach your target market of buyers and engage local real estate agents? Green homes are a bit different; most of the value is behind the walls, improvements and high efficient equipment.  Perhaps the key element is creating value by showcasing the individual components and having a long list of benefits for each part.

Here are four steps that every green home marketing plan should include:

• Dedicated blog site, this is where you engage buyers with informative content explaining the upgrades, benefits and it also creates more transparency and trust (one tip start early and include lots of photos).
• Agent engagement, it starts with educating the agent about the product, they can’t sell what they don’t understand, and an ongoing well designed e-mail campaign works very well.
• A knowledgeable staff that understands and can articulate the product and turn the features into benefits for the buyers.
• Green home buyers like to be involved, interior displays showing how, what and why these homes are built for the next-generation of buyers. This is a great buyer engagement piece.

Adrian Willanger has an MBA in Sustainability, LEED AP, Real Estate Broker, and is a certified Earth Advantage Broker, EcoBroker, Built Green Agent and is founder of Eco-Redux Media.

Vantage Seafood, Seattle

Welcome newest client Vantage Seafood

Welcome are newest client Vantage Seafood, LLC in Redmond Washington.  Vantage is seafood broker that specializing in crab products.  We started working with them 3 months ago to extend their reach and give their monthly newsletter a polished finished look. In addition to working on branding and distribution we help set up a tracking and a contact management system where they can actually see how many and who is reading their letter, this helps them understand quickly what their clients are looking for.

Their average opening of their online campaigns is averaging 35-37% open rate.

Builder Martha Rose, president of Martha Rose Construction in Seattle Washington, is electing to upgrade traditional builder grade incandescent lighting in her new homes, City Cabins in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood, with ultra-compact and extremely efficient Juno Mini LED Downlights and Gimbals.

The living rooms of City Cabins will be displaying the much sought –after “quiet-ceiling” architectural designed fixtures featuring Mini LED Downlights and the Gimbals that feature a 30 degree aiming and 360 degree rotation, perfect for adding a bit of drama to your favorite work of art!

The beauty of this type of task lighting is that it produces virtually no heat while enhancing visual comfort while using 1/10 the energy of traditional lighting. The lights are expected to last 50,000 hours which equals about 5 years if you left them on 24/7.

Rose mentions “sustainable building is all about doing more using less.” This type of think has influential in their selection of light bulbs for the “Cabins.” It just makes sense to use more efficient bulbs that use less wattage even though the cost is greater but once you look at the whole profile or payback for a LED bulb compared to a standard incandescent bulb it makes more financial sense.

A typical incandescent bulb would take 60 watts to produce 800 lumens where a CFL bulb would take up to 15 watts and a LED would take up to 12 watts to produce 800 lumens. The initial cost of an incandescent bulb is small compared to the cost of the energy it uses over its lifetime.

City Cabins are due to be competed in December of 2011, for more information visit CityCabins.com or contact Adrian Willanger 206 909-7536.

New Homes on Queen Anne Hill approaching net-zero

City Cabins builder Martha Rose’s passion for sustainable building can be traced back to the energy crisis of the 1970s. “The Carter administration started giving grants to people with innovative about how to use less energy,” mentions Rose.

When Rose learned about the Built Green program in Seattle in 2003 she thought this would be natural transition for her company to become “certified green home builder.” Her company was already following much of the guidelines on the Built Green checklist.

Since 2003 many of Rose’s project have become more energy efficient than the previous projects. Rose continues to push the energy saving envelope utilizing new techniques in building science and material innovations to get closer to the goal of building a net-zero home.City Cabins in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood are getting very close, the two high-performance come with many built in features that most builders charge extra for such as increased insulation, quadruple glazed windows, heat-recovery-ventilator, and extremely high-end Energy Star appliances.

The homes are at finishing stage and are scheduled to be completed in December 2011. For more information visit CityCabins.com or alternatively contact Adrian Willanger 206 909-7536.

Is Your Home Ready for the Cars of the Future?

Several major auto makers like Audi, BMW and Volkswagen are leading the way utilizing lightweight auto body materials and electrified powertrains to build cars of the future. RMI has come out with a 5 step program that outlines how we can reduce our oil addiction by 2050. Read the full article by Jesse Morris and Greg Rucks

looking for a high-performance all electric home in Seattle visit CityCabins.com

The art of sustainable development starts by analyzing the building site and coming up with a site design that protects natural and other features that exist on the site. Builder Martha Rose elected to reuse a large percentage of the existing foundation from the existing 1940 duplex for their latest urban project City Cabins in Seattle. Retooling and reusing the existing foundation was a key component in reducing pollution from construction activities by minimizing soil erosion, topology disturbance, waterway sedimentation and dust that would have taken place if they had elected to use traditional construction methods.

The three story homes are designed to take advantage of the views of Fisherman’s Terminal and the Olympic Mountains to the West while providing natural daylighting and privacy without feeling like you’re in an urban-fishbowl. The homes are slightly terraced off the street separated by an elevated sidewalk from street level.  The terracing offers the City Cabin homeowners privacy from the pedestrian’s view while the top of terrace offer a level platform for sitting, greeting neighbors or just enjoying the view.

The raised sidewalk is a unique urban pattern that adds to the walkability of the North Queen Anne neighborhood, configuring to the natural terrain the walkway offer increased pedestrian safety from automobiles, view corridors and green planting strips that separate the sidewalk from the street.

City Cabins are scheduled for a mi-December completion for more information visit CityCabins.com or alternatively contact Adrian Willanger 206 909-7536.

City Cabins in Seattle

New Homes with Juice on Queen Anne Hill

According to a recent report by Pike Research by 2015 automakers worldwide are expecting to sell more than 3 million electric vehicles.  Forward thinking builder Martha Rose, president of Martha Rose Construction, is making it easy for home buyers to have an electric vehicle by pre-wiring their new City Cabin homes for Electric-Vehicle (EV) charging stations.

Going a bit further Rose has installed a 2KW photo-voltaic system on one of the two homes, the other is pre-wired for solar and an EV station, the solar array will produce enough electricity to power an electric vehicle between  7,000-10,000 miles a year depending on the make of the vehicle.

This trend is something that designers and builders are starting to look at across the country; Monday KB Home announced that it will build all its homes under the Build San Antonio Green program starting in December.  KB Home is one of the largest homebuilders in the country.

City Cabins two high performance homes locate in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle are due to be completed in December of 2011. For more information visit the web site CityCabins.com or contact Adrian Willanger 206 909-7536.

City Cabins to Shine Brighter

Home builder Martha Rose, president of Martha Rose Construction in Seattle, is adding arrays of LED lighting to her latest project in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood. The projects, City Cabins, are all-electric powered homes.

More lumens equals more light

Rose mentions “sustainable building is all about doing more using less.” This type of think has influential in their selection of light bulbs for the “Cabins.” It just makes sense to use more efficient bulbs that use less wattage even though the cost is greater but once you look at the whole profile or payback for a LED bulb compared to a standard incandescent bulb it makes more financial sense.

A typical incandescent bulb would take 60 watts to produce 800 lumens where a CFL bulb would take up to 15 watts and a LED would take up to 12 watts to produce 800 lumens. When searching for high efficient LED bulbs, at the top of the list, we found the CREE that would produce 950 lumens using only 9 watts of electricity, the bulb retails for $79.95.

As the popularity of LED lighting increases the price will start to come down along with the passing of the 2007 the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) that was signed into law. The Department of Energy (DOE) issued new energy efficiency standards for fluorescent and incandescent bulbs. It will be phased-in 2012 through 2014 (California will begin one year earlier starting January, 2011)

City Cabins will use both CFLs and the next generation LED lighting for their lighting solution of their new homes.

City Cabins are due to be completed in mid-December and are now available for pre-sale. For more information about these two-high performance homes visit CityCabins.com or contact Adrian Willanger.

Energy Heel at City Cabins

Green Steps on Queen Anne Hill

Award winning green home builder Martha Rose, president of Martha Rose Construction in Seattle, believes building a high-performance home you really have to pay attention to the small details.

At her current project, City Cabins in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood, prior to installing the drywall Rose has a thermographic inspection by building performance consultant Tom Balderson.

Using an infrared camera they look check for cool spots in the exterior walls.  This helps Rose determine if there is any air infiltration that needs to be sealed prior to drywalling and also as a quality control measure to make sure the insulation has been installed correctly.

After the drywall has been installed, taped and all the finished work has been installed  Rose will have Balderson do a blower door test to look once again for any air leakage, the leaks will appear has as contrasting colors on the viewfinder of the infrared camera.

City Cabins are perhaps the most energy efficient spec-homes on the market today in the Pacific Northwest. The homes are slated for a mid-December completion. For more information contact Adrian Willanger, LEED AP. Or visit the website CityCabins.com.