Watch the Video on Green Design (Tradewinds – Geoffrey Mouen Architects)
HOST: You're the architect for Tradewinds. It's a big, beautiful house, what, seven thousand square feet?
GEOF: Seven thousand three hundred and sixteen square feet.
HOST: What are some of the design considerations when you're planning to build such a large house?
GEOF: Oh, several -- several considerations. This is a showcase house, for one. (HOST: Right) So we want people to take something away from this house. So we analyze the market. We work with focus groups, figure out what they want in the house. We understand the scale of this house. Showcase houses are generally large, (HOST: Yes) so we have to figure out what that market is. Who is going to buy a large house like this? We also want to figure out where it is. You know we have to define where in the site it's going to be -- what community. And we picked Baldwin Park, which is a New Urbanist community.
HOST: (OVER) And that's here in Orlando?
GEOF: That's here in Orlando. And that Baldwin Park Community as a New Urbanist community has lots of great high performance sort of community things in it.
HOST: Something that's very important to me as a builder that's trying to go green, how do you use design as an element of green building?
GEOF: Well design is actually very critical to green building. I think traditional architecture and the way we designed this house is the original green. It's a passive approach to the design. We have a courtyard house in Florida (HOST: Right) that takes advantage of all the outdoor living. It has large windows and doors that open up to let the air ventilate --
HOST: (OVER) So it maintains the right temperature.
GEOF: The right temperature. You know eight months of the year it's beautiful in Orlando. It's absolutely gorgeous. So -- That's why people move here. And to seal up the house and make it tight and try to make our energy efficiencies really -- really efficient and tight is sort of the wrong approach. What we've done here is we've opened the house up. We've let it breathe and open up to the natural environment. That was one really key factor in it. We used basic traditional principles -- classical principles. It's a courtyard house. It's a roman house in a way. It's lifted up on a plinth off the ground. There's lots of rain in Florida, so we wanted to lift the house up.
HOST: And most homes in Florida -- from my understanding in being here -- are slabs.
GEOF: Yeah, there's a lot of construction that's slab on the grade. But when you look at the older houses, they were also lifted up.
HOST: (OVER) Lifted up to keep the moisture out of the structure.
GEOF: To keep the moisture out of the house, too. So here this house is lifted up. It's a courtyard house and it has narrow wings. It's built of three narrow wings, and that allows natural light to come into all the rooms. So in fact you can actually turn off the air-conditioning and not use the electricity as much -- not use as many lights because of all the natural light.
We've put the bedroom wings -- bedroom wing with the master bedroom and the children's bedroom on the eastern side of the house so that you awake with the light instead of depending on the (HOST: the light switch) -- the light switch or the alarm clock, you know. So we put that. And that -- that's classical. A roman house is built that way. That's just something that's been handed down to us from generation to generation that we've sort of forgotten about in all this engineering of our houses, you know. So this house is actually green by design, not by device.
HOST: It's easier to have your house designed to be green than to take a traditional home and then make it green.
GEOF: Yeah. I would say old traditional houses are inherently green but the conventional home and turning that into a green house is quite difficult. You know adding those gadgets and gizmos on to a house? That's tricky. If you start from the very beginning with good traditional design -- cross-ventilation, natural light, large overhangs -- in this climate -- (HOST: Right, right) -- it works very well. Up in the north? You know in northern climates you want to tighten that house up and get it really -- to conserve the energy.
HOST: (OVER) Looking for more sun and less shade. (GEOF: Yes, yes) Is there a website? We'll go ahead and put a link for Tradewinds on our website hgtvpro.com. But is there another website they can look at the house?
GEOF: They can look at the house on our website: Geoffrey Mouen Architects dot com. It's actually gmarchitects.com. (HOST: Great) Very easy to get to: gmarchitects.com.
HOST: I appreciate it.
GEOF: Sure. [END]
Watch the Video on Green Design (Tradewinds – Geoffrey Mouen Architects)
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