Sommerhaus Piu: Prefabulous!
August 11th, 2009
It’s always been a dream of mine to have a tree house. Well, not a house in a tree per se, but a small sustainable home nestled in the bosom of a piney wilderness. It would be my family’s own little hideaway, where we’d go to breathe the fresh air and listen to birds chirp and do all the wonderful sorts of simple things that we rarely get to do since the advent of text messaging and BlackBerrys and Facebook.
Where this home will be situated exactly, I haven’t yet figured out. But like a bride who’s found her dress but not her groom, I have found the house!
The sustainable pre-fab home, dubbed Sommerhaus Piu (“more summerhouse”) by its German creators, industrial designer Patrick Frey and architect Björn Götte, offers nearly 650 square feet of indoor living space and a 376-square-foot canopied terrace, which is about the size of a very generous one-bedroom apartment in New York City (although I don’t know of many NYC one bedrooms with that large of a patio — or a patio at all, for that matter). And with that much beauty surrounding you, how much space inside do you really need, anyway?
Some eco stats about the house:
- Made of partially recycled materials
- Large windows encourage use of natural light
- No foam insulation; cotton insulation is used for windows
- High energy efficiency
- Strip foundation minimizes impact on surroundings
- Roof can be turned into a “green” roof or fitted with solar panels
Sommerhaus Piu was designed to be an affordable option for a summer/weekend home, and at 110.000€ (at last check, about $156,000 US) and constructed to last, I think I’ll file it away in my “maybe one day achievable fantasy” drawer.
Want to see more photos of Sommerhaus Piu and/or contact the designer? Click here.
–Jennifer Grayson
Update: Sommerhaus Piu might not be so prefabulous after all.
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September 30th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Sorry, but we prefer to write an old-fashioned letter …
Dear Jennifer Grayson,
On browsing through your extraordinary blog we cannot help but admire you: a beautiful and talented young woman and so outstandingly motivated in promoting among many things high-value eco goods, apparently/hopefully not from mere commercial interest!
The more disappointed we are to find you’ve fallen for “Sommerhaus Piu”. It’s true – there is something to say, e.g. for the use of recycled material and cotton insulation instead of synthetic foam at the window frames … So the house may be up to eco standard in this respect. The architecture, however little innovative in its cubic industrial style, is certainly a matter of taste and shall therefore not be enlarged on here. What is debatable though or must even be downright disapproved of, are the large glass panes set up right in the middle of a/any natural bird habitat!
You write enthusiastically “…we’d go … listen to birds chirp …” but had better realise you will more often hear them crash into the panes (no joke!). If you are faster than your neighbour’s cat you need not worry about what you will have for your gourmet dinner (not really a joke either): robin, wren, thrush, woodpecker, even the dazzling and colourful European kingfisher (!), perhaps the odd buzzard … all of them still at home in the beautiful lake surroundings of Pian, North of Berlin, Germany.
Thus, instead of calling this summerhouse “Piu” (probably unwittingly recalling onomatopoetically the lonesome cry of the buzzard!), our suggestion would be “Sommerhaus Vogelschlag (Birdcrash)”. Obviously some people have already experienced the fatal impact on birds and somewhat helplessly “embellished” one of the two houses on the site in Pian as you can see in the picture we would have liked to include to add to your collection of advertising snaps, providing your input window had allowed for this. If interested you can find it attached to our comment at http://www.qype.com (search for “Sommerhaus Piu”)
The rhetoric question is: can we afford to go on transporting into the countryside what has long been acknowledged for our big cities anyway: glassed-in buildings that destructive to bird populations?! (We refer to investigations and figures put forward by world-renowned scientists like Dr. Ley, Vogelwarte (bird station) Radolfzell/Lake Constance, Germany, or to your own bird crash specialist Karen Imperato Cotton, American Bird Conservancy)
A lovely, intelligent, and knowledgeable woman like you – even having campaigned for Obama! – must have stumbled across the fact that ecology is not merely about our energy consumption as related to sustainable resources but also about how we/every single person can/must help protect biodiversity: Old Seattle, the Indian Chief (whether a fake or not) rambled on and oner so wisely about it and he was not the first to do so.
Our conclusion: “Sommerhaus Piu” is quite misplaced on an otherwise really useful blog like yours, I daresay – if only because an insult to any caring ecologically minded visitor, defiant of a highly endangered good (biodiversity) and therefore ecologically more than lopsided as this house is.
Mind you, we did not mean to write a piece of downright destructive criticism, because we believe in your good intentions. Hope you can accept our comment as we tried to make it as helpful and constructive as our own eco conscience allows for.
With love and best wishes for you and your further successful striving towards spreading ecological thinking and doing from
RoseMarie, Germany
P. s.: “Patriotic”? Yes, very much so – if the meaning of this word also holds the global eco knowledge that we all live in the world as in the one house we inherited from our fathers and will have to pass on to our children …
September 22nd, 2010 at 7:10 pm
We have to find more possibilities in order to help save our earth. Good reading about this.
February 1st, 2012 at 6:02 am
Someone solved the problem. German enterprise – Arnold Glas- invented an almost birdcrash-save glas. If someone is interested in, here is the link: http://www.arnold-glas.de/index.php?article_id=17&clang=1
All the best, Dirk