Inside Look: The First Home to Receive LEED for Home Platinum Rating

According to Steve, “there is nothing necessarily more sustainable about prefab homes, except that they create much less construction waste. What makes our homes more sustainable is how we design homes and build them.”

Steve’s own home was the first-ever house that his design studio designed and built, and is an example of radical home sustainability. Built-in 2006, his house, known as the LivingHome RK1, was also the first home ever to be certified as LEED platinum.

The eleven module home encompasses 2,500 square feet, includes three bedrooms and two and a half baths, and is located in Santa Monica, California. Ray Kappe, the renowned architect who has been characterized as “the apotheosis of the California House” designed the home.

In terms of the construction process, everything from the foundation up was assembled on-site in only eight hours after the modules were built at the LivingHomes factory.

Energy Considerations of the LivingHomes RK1

The RK1 is moderately sized at around 2,500 square feet. It was designed as an urban infill strategy, but the design can also be modified for 5 bedrooms and 3.5 bath design. The modest size of the home, however, shouldn’t fool you as it packs in a ton of details to maximize the livability of the home.

Sustainable Materials 

Another important element of the overall sustainability of the RK1 was that it aimed to radically reduce resource use and the carbon emissions associated with the building and performance of the home. All of the major building materials were either obtained from recycled or reclaimed sources. The home has a steel frame, and steel is the most recycled building material with over 65 million tons of steel scrap being recycled each and every year. “Much of the steel used for the frame of our home probably came from old cars,” Steve mentions.

All the wood in the home is also FSC certified to confirm that it was sourced from sustainably managed forests.

The LivingHomes RK1 also includes tiles made from recycled glass, shower dividers that are made from recycled plastic, and countertops that are made from newsprint cellulose. The high-performance insulation in the walls is made from recycled jeans.

To maintain the highest standards of indoor air quality, all of the paints and stains are either VOC free or have extremely low VOC emissions. There are fans located in all of the bathrooms that operate on motion control to take out moisture before it can cause mold and negatively affect the indoor air quality. Steve’s home also includes a fan in the garage that gets rid of any carbon monoxide emissions from vehicles before it can seep into the home.

Even the gas fireplaces contribute to the sustainability of the home. The fireplace burns denatured alcohol, also known as ethanol. This allows the fireplace to burn cleanly while producing virtually no smoke.

As a factory-built home, the RK1 certainly reduced the amount of construction waste while also expediting the overall construction and assembly time. The sustainability features of this home, however, result from an environmentally conscious design process, which is one of the reasons that this was the nation’s first LEED Platinum home.