Mandala Homes Featured in HUFFINGTONPOST
"Tucked away in the wilderness of Nelson, B.C. lives a couple who, with their design company, aims to change the way we build homes.
Lars Chose and Rachel Ross run Mandala Homes, a firm that uses sustainable B.C. wood to build energy efficient houses. Bonus: they look like adorable little beach huts.
Ross describes the circular homes as "exquisite celebrations of shape, design, and wood," with domed ceilings and a ton of natural light.
The company, founded in 2000, uses special techniques to design passive solar homes with everything from heat pumps to gas furnaces to electric baseboards — they built the province's first Energy Star qualified home.
While they have basic designs for you to work with, you get to customize it to fit your personal requirements. Prices start at $49,000.
"We live within a fertile forest of cedar, spruce, pine and fir famous for its world-class quality," states Mandala's website. "We hike, bike and ski among these trees and are proud to craft sustainable homes, for all over the world, made from this special B.C. wood."
Mandala projects can be found in Alberta, Alaska, and even Norway.
"We are so lucky with the quality of life (and amazing out-of-the-box-thinking customers!) that we get to enjoy as we engage in meaningful work," Ross told The Huffington Post B.C. in an email."
Full article here
What is an EnerGuide rating?
An EnerGuide rating shows a standard measure of your home's energy performance. It shows you (and future buyers) exactly how energy efficient your home is.
From Us to YOU!
Nothing makes us happier than designing beautiful ENERGY STAR round homes for you! Happy Holidays from Mandala Homes.
Announcing Indwell Design
If you are lucky enough to call the Kootenays home we have construction crews available to assist with your project, big or small. We also offer products to improve the efficiency of your home, including insulation, door and window packages. We are developing www.indwelldesign.com, more ideas and images coming soon.
Mandala Homes in Vancouver Sun
Energy-efficient homes have become the norm and in the pursuit of sustainability homeowners and designers are returning to a more traditional type, the round home.
But what many residents of circular houses have found is there are also spiritual and emotional benefits to the shape.
Rebecca Christofferson, clinical counsellor and art therapist, lives in Vancouver Island’s Cowichan Valley and had intended on building a round cob home on her property. But when she realized there was an existing home on the lot she decided to erect a yurt to serve as a guest bedroom, workshop and spiritual healing space.
“A big part of why I decided to build a yurt was the circular space,” said Christofferson. “The imagery of the nomadic was significant as well, and you don’t need to have it permitted so there is a real freedom with that.”
Yurts are portable homes traditionally used by nomads in Central Asia made of wooden ribs and layers of fabric and sheep’s wool felt for insulation and weatherproofing. “People who have spent time in our yurt have said the world sort of shuts out,” said Christofferson. “It just feels like a huge blanket on the space; it is womblike. The world slows down and it is energetically quieter.”
While some people have chosen yurts for their temporary qualities, designers like Lars Chose have channelled the spiritual qualities he’s identified in round homes into the structures he creates with his company Mandala Custom Homes.
Chose had been designing and building homes for 20 years on the side while working as a psychotherapist, but it wasn’t until 1995 that he built his first round house.
“I saw where the world was going with the environment and the work I was doing with children and families,” he said. “It came to me one day that I needed to be part of the change that needed to happen in a much stronger way.
“I had been studying how homes take half our resources to build and half our resources to cool and keep warm, and I decided to start a company and use the round (shape) as a way to express both an environmentally friendly and a healthy home.” As a practising Buddhist, Chose said the shape connected well with the word mandala which has significance to the religion.
According to Chose, mandala means the interconnected whole. “For me the most awakened place is when we live in that awakened (sense of) knowing that we are interdependent,” he said.
“There is no separation and that is our greatest pain to feel that separation. To be in a building that is shaking you and communicating that interdependence, it just supports and amplifies any spiritual practice or yearnings that we have."
Energy-Efficient Homes Less Likely To Default
Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions reveals good news about making the choice to build an Energy-Efficient Mandala Home
PICS reports: “The risk of defaulting on a mortgage is 32% lower for homeowners that live in energy-efficient homes, according to a new study by the University of North Carolina – Center for Community Capital. The study, “Home Energy Efficiency and Mortgage Rates,” is the first to try to quantify the connection between a home’s energy efficiency and default risk of the homeowner. To assess whether residential energy efficiency is associated with lower default risks, the report is based on a national sample of about 71,000 single-family home mortgages, and takes into account loan, household, and neighborhood characteristics. The report finds that more efficient houses are associated with lower default risk and concludes that money saved on energy costs is a factor explaining the lower default risk. It stands to reason that because owners of efficient homes save money on utility bills, they can therefore put those savings toward mortgage payments.
The findings of this study suggest that the US housing market may be well served by considering rules that would improve the accuracy of mortgage underwriting through ensuring that energy costs are considered in the mortgage underwriting process. One approach has been adopted here in Canada already. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) offers a 10% premium refund on its mortgage loan insurance program, as well as an extended amortization period, to individuals who use CMHC-insured financing to purchase energy efficient homes. The stated purpose of the program is to promote energy conservation and provide initiatives that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Provincially, British Columbians are saving energy and money through participation in the LiveSmart BC program, which offers more than $7,000 in rebates in 54 different areas for energy efficiency. FortisBC’s PowerSense program also offers rebates and financial incentives to make upgrading to energy-saving technologies more affordable.”
Your “Just Right” Home
Some aspects of a home that is just right for you are very personal.Homey elements can be symbols of places from your past- perhaps a childhood bedroom that was a sanctuary, a favorite collection of books, a photo of the front porch of your grandmas house, fabric from the first crazily painted freedom space of your young adulthood or a postcard evoking the shadowy memory of a glimpse of a perfect room in your travels.
These are items that can make us feel good and at home. Most of us are aware of the importance of these positive memories and the benefit of including symbols of them in our current home..
However, other elements of a “just right home” resonate with what environmental psychologists call our evolutionary needs. These are deep, often unconscious, feelings about habitat that are particular to our human species.
Architect Grant Hildebrand studied the common denominators of inherently likable buildings by beginning with the question; Why might homo sapiens be drawn to some places and repelled by others? His conclusion correlates with other thinkers; on a survival level, the first people needed food, water and protection. Thus, their ancestors (we) have inherited a preference for fundamentally supportive environments.
According to Hildebrand, we instinctively prefer an environment that is a combination of field, stream and grove of trees- hunting range, water and shelter. Our fondness for this combination is evident in the paintings of old masters, images on kitchen calendars. as facets of most parks, etc.
Hildebrand sought ways to bring the essence of this deeply attractive fertile meadow veined by a winding brook and edged by a beautiful forest into our homes.
Home designers can incorporate these archetypal elements into the homes they were designing and thus contribute to quality of life for their clients.
Hildebrand teamed up with other architects, a biologist, a geographer and a psychologist to study and identify 5 characteristics that enhance our human experience of home- prospect and refuge, enticement, peril and complex order.
The most important evolutionary elements of an appealing home are “prospect” and “refuge”. Prospect is a big bright space that has a broad, interesting view (the meadow). Refuge is a protected haven that is nest-like (the forest). What makes a house feel like a home are three things; 1) the ability to observe both kinds of spaces from the viewpoint of the other 2) to have the option of occupying either the snug or the expansive space and 3) to be able to enjoy the contrast between the two.
There’s not a single formula for the right proportion of prospect to refuge. Homes in different climates might evoke different needs, like a windy prairie home might need more refuge than a cottage in the forest which might need more of an expansive feel to balance it out. Also, different temperaments and genders can prefer different ratios. For example , Hildebrand’s female students designed more refuge into their projects, the male students tended to bring more of the element of prospect into their design.
Understanding this principle can offer some interesting ideas for how to design your new home or inhabit your current home in a way that connects you more deeply with your archetypal roots.
How do you make your home feel ‘just right’ to you? Do the ideas of prospect and refuge ring true for you? Which part of your home is open and expansive , which part is nest-like?
Mandala Homes at BUILDEX Vancouver
Ready to travel from Nelson to Vancouver, meet like-minded building people, and answer questions about Mandala Homes.
Lars Chose and Rachel Ross of Mandala Homes will be attending the BUILDEX show Feb. 13th and 14th, 2013. at the Vancouver Convention Centre. We look forward to meeting you!
Snug Mandala Home
“Efficient house design is based on the natural energies coming into the system (sun, wind,rain) on surrounding vegetation, and on commonsense building practices.” Bill Mollison
South Elevation
The use of intelligent design to reduce the amount of energy required to operate a home can substantially lower the environmental impact and the long term cost to the owners. The design of our home uses the passive solar benefit of the site; we conducted a digital sun-study and built the roof overhang and installed dual glazed, argon-filled, Low E180 windows on this south elevation. This maximizes solar gain during the winter and reduces heat gain during the summer without the use of any extra energy.
North Elevation. Entrance.
Wintertime in this round home is warm and cozy. The combination of super-insulated walls, air-tight building envelope (draft free environment), passive solar design, nestled protection in the grove of trees and redundant heating systems means that it serves as a welcome sanctuary in the storm.