A Tour of California's Caterpillar House
Last Updated: Feb 8, 2025The first LEED Platinum custom home on California’s Central Coast defines the essence of sustainability. Combining an aesthetic, modern design, connection to the local landscape, and several essential elements of sustainable construction, the Caterpillar House can act as a prototype for homes seeking maximum sustainability, livability, and aesthetics.
Table of Contents
- What Makes the Caterpillar House so Special?
- The Underlying Values that Helped to Shape the Caterpillar Home
- Bottom Line
Rise recently sat down to talk with Feldman Architecture, the San Francisco-based architectural firm that designed the Caterpillar home located in the rolling hills of the Santa Lucia Preserve, about two hours south of the San Francisco Bay area. The modern-ranch home contains a strong connection between indoor and outdoor spaces, tied to the local landscape in a very tangible sense.
What Makes the Caterpillar House so Special?
Thermal Performance
The majority of the walls of the Caterpillar House are made from rammed earth, which was sourced from the soil excavated at the building site. According to the experts at Feldman Architecture: “At Caterpillar House, we chose rammed earth walls to act as these thermal masses. The walls themselves at 16” thick and are strategically located to capture heat around the building throughout the day. Obviously, they also provide a strong aesthetic that was used to define the material pallet of the home. For this particular project, the entire team was drawn to the warm, natural color tones the walls provide.”
The home was designed for maximum solar heating and cooling through elongated East-West orientation that maximizes the efficiency of passive heating. The exposed concrete floors and rammed earth walls absorb heat from the daytime sun and release it slowly during the cool nights to naturally moderate the interior temperature of the building. In terms of energy-efficient windows, the South facing glazing has a U-factor of 0.25 and a Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC) of 0.4 to optimize passive solar gain.
Cross ventilation and ceiling fans throughout cool the entire home. Shading trellises and long overhangs on the south and west walls also reduce the need for a cooling system. Deciduous trees and retractable awnings provide summer shading on the south-facing glazing while allowing the sun’s heat to penetrate during cooler winter months. Air leakage is minimized with blown-in, bio-based insulation. The house also features an insulated, recirculating hot water system.
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While the thermal performance of the Caterpillar House is certainly noteworthy, it also contains other sustainability features.
Healthy Home
- Low formaldehyde and low VOC materials used throughout the home to reduce exposure to harmful toxins in the air.
- Exhaust fans in bathrooms and kitchen ensure healthier indoor air quality.
Materials with Less Impact
- While the home is operationally sustainable, the embodied energy imprint is also minimal due to a focus on using low embodied energy materials that were either locally sourced or sourced from recycled building content. The rammed earth walls were built from on-site soil is one example of materials that reduce the embodied energy of the home.
- The cement that was used for the foundation is made from 35% fly ash content in the structural footings and slab and 15% fly ash content in the topping slab and landscape pavers, radically reducing the ecological footprint of the cement that was used.
- The flooring was made from a reclaimed wine cork, beautiful material and great example of up-cycling.
- In the kitchen, recycled composite quartzite countertops and sustainably harvested (FSC certified) wood framing and bamboo cabinetry helped to reduce the overall waste generation from the construction by 87% compared to typical construction methods.
Tobias Roberts
Tobias runs an agroecology farm and a natural building collective in the mountains of El Salvador. He specializes in earthen construction methods and uses permaculture design methods to integrate structures into the sustainability of the landscape.