The Green Lie

I’m Tim Verras, marketing consultant for difference Design. The lab asked me to write about marketing in the housing industry and discuss how greenwashing has changed it. But that’s been done. So I’m going to change it up and talk about why greenwashing works and what we here at difference Design are doing about it.

As hard as Mad Men tries to glamorize the lifestyle, you probably think that marketing is evil. In describing it, you would use the word “lie.” This is a personal, deep hatred brought about by one simple fact: marketing works. If we truly felt that marketing was all about lies, it would never work. But it does, and it does so predictably. Humans are creatures and as such we are subject to certain behavioral laws. It is these laws that marketing exploits. It’s not lying. It is the Art of Arousing Human Desire

If that sounds vague sexual, it’s not by mistake. Marketing works off the same principals as lingerie.  It’s why we find partially clothed bodies sexier than nakedness. The mystery. The lie of it all. For what is lingerie but elegant lies strapped to our bodies?

You see, it’s not Marketing’s fault you’ve been lied to— it’s ours.  We get sucked in because we want to get sucked in. But when the blinders fall off, we all feel used. Lied to.  So we blame it out loud and curse its name even as we begin contriving our next desire for a Starbucks.

This is a phenomenon the housing industry is just now relearning. It wasn’t until the environmental revolution at the turn of the century that builders decided they could make houses desirable through some means other than location, location, location, size, size, size. With this new enviro movement, the builders were gifted with a powerful tool, The Green Lie.

People want homes that are environmentally friendly have neither the time nor the resources to fact check most claims. Builders seize the opportunity to leverage this desire by wrapping their homes in a sort of lingerie. Energy Star, LEED, Gray Water Systems, Solar Panels.  Are any of these things bad?  Quite the opposite.  But they do constitute a system ripe for exploitation.

In the end, you have McMansion’s with solar panels on the roof. Look at the elaborate granite fixtures. The triple faucets in the standing shower.  The manicured lawn.  The solar panels themselves aren’t to blame, they are merely a vehicle for The Lie. It’s sort of the housing equivalent of getting a diet Coke with your 2000 calorie Five Guys meal. The dressings may change, but at its core, we are still building the same way we always have – wastefully.

But we can change that.

Building environmentally friendly houses doesn’t have to be about racking up scores and certifications or implementing expensive, untested technologies.   Sure these items will continue to be the playground of the rich, but for the rest of us, they are out of reach. We are stuck with no recourse but to consume the wasteful structures of the past.

We can change that too.

Greenwashing will work for only as long as it takes for people to truly understand what building an environmentally friendly home entails.   There are some hard facts to be faced up to.  I’ll give only one example, but it is one of the most difficult to stamp out:  our houses are too big.  Way too big.  On a planet slowly cooking itself, it might seem like madness to spend energy every single minute to heat, cool, and light a bedroom that is used twice a year when guests come, but try to convince your realtor that you don’t need that third bedroom and they will look at you like you’re the crazy one.

We hope we can change that impulse to buy the biggest, most expensive house you can possibly afford, and instead embrace a philosophy where every element is engineered to maximize impact-to-value ratio. And that’s what we’re doing here at difference Design — thinking really hard about how to build truly sustainable homes that you and I can afford and then couple them with fantastic new ways to educate the owners. 

It’s not free of marketing, mind you. It’s just a marriage of sustainable building methodology and buyer expectations. And like any good marriage, it needs a bit of lingerie. However you can be rest assured that our marketing will focus on driving your desires to places that matter. To places you won’t mind waking up next to in the next morning.

Those places can exist and we hope to build them.

My Barn

Someday I will live in barn. That’s right. Chicken’s, sheep, the whole setup.  I’m serious.  I went to school in Bennington, Vermont and while I was there, I babysat for a lovely family that converted a barn into a wonderful home. The typical barn shape lends itself to expression, and at the same time has a wonderful, sheltering feeling to it.  

If you don’t know Atlanta, well, we don’t have too many barns left around these parts. Since it looks like Atlanta is for me (I really do love it here), I’ll share a few of the houses that got this idea cooking in the first place.  

The Barn House -> Belgium 

by Buro2 

Louver House -> Long Island, NY 

by LSS

ModernBarn Conversion -> Sussex 

by LCE Architects

Converted Dairy Barn -> Sussex 

by LCE Architects 

Vitra Mueum -> Germany 

by Herzong + de Meuron

Not a barn per say, but I love the lincoln log feeling.  One of the things that we try for in our work is a feeling of timelessness.  So often I come across a modern home and can tell almost to the year when it was designed.  These designs blend the old and the new so beautifully though, they create a style with no expiration date.

--Sarah

Farther Afield

Welcome to farther afield, which will be a semi-regular feature from our creative director, Honora Foah.

Difference

The qualities.  Is it rough or slippery?  Is it hot or 5 minutes exactly out of the refrigerator?  Is it blue-white, blue-grey or blue-green?  We reward and pay attention to very small differences.  The difference between an Olympic gold medalist  and the person who runs dead last is usually a fraction of a second.  Less than a second.  One is going to get sponsorship contracts and one is going home to be a used car salesman.

Attention to the qualities of a thing in tiny details or in the ability to completely rethink a whole genre leads, I think, to quality.  And also to happiness.   Some like it hot.  If you like it hot, then that is a quality of Thai food that brings pleasure and if it isn’t hot enough it’s kind of nyeh.

I think we respond to precision, to things that suit us down to the ground.  Some of those things are universal and some very individual.  The idea behind difference design is that paying attention to what makes a difference to our sense, what makes a difference to our finances and really caring about that as every single piece of a house is rethought and tweaked, will create happiness.

Here’s an example of a two micron difference that changed a city block:

and this is rethinking the whole thing and making a difference.

- Honora Foah

Design Inspiration

Welcome to The Beginning!

I'm Sarah, the lead designer at difference DESIGN Lab.

I've been casting about online for a while trying to figure out what my role should be on the difference DESIGN blog, and after a certain amount time, I realized that what I was doing WAS my role on the blog.  I don't know about you, but for me it's impossible to imagine what people did before Pinterest, much less the WWW.

In this space I plan to share with you all of the beautimous stuff I find during my long and ever so lovely adventures on the web, with a few real life photos (taken by moi) thrown in for good measure.  We'll end up all over the place, since you never know where inspiration will come from.

And just like that, we're off!

Here are a few things to whet your whistle:

A machine that is just amazing. I was clapping by the end.

Wishing Paris was a bit closer so I could have a cozy nightcap at the swanky underground bar Candelaria: (Photos by David Rager)

Much more to come early next week.....  

Bottoms Up,

Sarah

In Which We Put Out A Press Release

Design Firm to Provide Affordable, Sustainable Modern Homes


Atlanta – difference DESIGN, a building and real estate consulting company, has officially launched in February of 2012. The company seeks to provide high-design modern homes at a price point much lower than is typically found for this type of construction. The homes will also be environmentally sustainable with an eye towards value engineering and low-impact building materials.


Company founder Zach Hill had this to say about the industry:


“Construction is a $1.2 trillion a year industry in which 86% of projects come in over budget and overdue. In no other industry do people spend so much and expect so little, and the consequences of these lowered expectations are grim for homeowners, the US economy, and the environment.”


The company’s current project is a modern three bedroom two and a half bathroom design called the Mark One. Drafted by award-winning Atlanta-based modern home architects DENCITY Design, the Mark One will feature a number of innovative building techniques such as utilizing intermodal containers for half of the building and cross-laminated timber (CLT) in the other half. While popular in Europe as an environmentally sound building material, the Mark One will be the first residence in the U.S. to be built with CLTs.


Staffan Svenson, the projects architect, talks about the Mark One’s design:


“When the idea of using CLT's entered the picture, it became clear how serious difference DESIGN are about putting a quality product out there. One of the most interesting parts of this design is the way the house reads as two forms that are both visually and functionally completely different. The first form, consisting of two shipping containers is carefully mapped out on the inside and complicated. The second form, the CLT form is it’s opposite: warm, airy, open and light. The two forms are then connected by a glass atrium which brings in more light and contains bridges that connect the two forms. It feels like a house without waste, where every space has been considered.


In addition to building homes, difference DESIGN also consults to builders to help them produce homes that are value-engineered, cost-effective and environmentally sustainable.


“So far, the sales pitch for ‘green’ construction has been ‘pay more now, save more later’” states Zach, “Unfortunately, there is already more than enough evidence to suggest that this business model doesn’t work, and never has. difference DESIGN focuses on providing sustainable builders and homeowners with a way to be cost competitive on day one, not year five.”


The company states that the first Mark One is being built in the Reynoldstown neighborhood of Atlanta and is slated for completion by the 3rd quarter of 2012. The company has plans to continue building more homes and is currently taking orders to build the Mark One or future designs as well as consulting arrangements. For more on the Mark One visit www.differencedesignlab.com.






ABOUT DIFFERENCE DESIGN


Difference design is an Atlanta-based builder and consultant specializing in producing sustainable, affordable modern homes with an eye towards design and value. The company plans to produce multiple designs of single family and multi-unit homes that can quickly be built without compromising quality or design aesthetic. Contact the company at info@differencedesignlab.com or visit www.differencedesignlab.com.

On Failure

Across from me in the Difference Design office is a shelf holding a row of Kodak Ektagraphic universal slide projector trays (long story).  Above that is a whiteboard with a work/traffic flow diagram of a kitchen project that demonstrates that the combined distance from the fridge to the stove to the sink is 18 feet (which may be too much). 

And above that is a reminder to myself that I look at many, many times every day:

Failure IS an option.

This is perhaps not the slogan that you want splashed across the front page of your web site, but it is, nevertheless, the base principle on which I base my day to day work. 

It has been written that construction is a 'dynamically conservative industry', that is: it works very hard to stay in the same place.  And that place is not a good one.  A study looking at building projects worldwide found that on a randomly selected project, the likelihood that actual costs were higher than estimated was 86%.  And not a little bit higher, on average, it was 28% higher.  In other words, the construction industry is doing a TERRIBLE job, almost across the board.

In what other industry would this kind of performance be tolerated?  How would you react if you ordered at a restaurant only to be told that your ravioli would be ready either tonight, or definitely by Wednesday. Also it would cost somewhere between 7 and 13 dollars, they'll let you know.  But when building a house, where the stakes are so much higher, that level of performance is literally standard.

I do not accept that such a state of affairs is acceptable or sustainable.  The way that we build needs to be rethought, and in dramatic, not incremental, ways.

Which is where the Lab in Difference Design Lab comes in.  The US Army may hold armor onto the sides of tanks with steel mesh Velcro, but it turns out that that is not a good way to hang siding.  It is true that lighting a room using long strands of fiber optic cable eliminates difficult and time consuming electrical runs, but it's also true that it is shockingly ugly.  Securing shelving to a steel wall using industrial strength magnates creates a quick and incredibly secure bond, unfortunately, anyone within 5 feet of said shelf with a pacemaker may wish we weren't quite so ingenious.

What do these things have in common?  They are all really bad ideas that I personally have come up with.  But, once in a blue moon, after testing and arguing and re-testing, we come up with something smart.

This is a blog about that testing and fighting.  I hate corporate blogs as much as you do, so no one will try to sell you anything here.   Instead, we hope you’ll follow along as we fail and argue our way to some dramatically better ways to build a house.


--Zach