It all started with 28 homes. A walkable food-forest made it a village oasis
The design started not with the homes, but with the water. In a desert, that makes sense. Dozens of earthen basins and rain gardens are scattered across the site so…
The lot fit 9 McMansions. They built 44 small homes for locals instead
Maggie and John Randolph kept losing employees priced out of the New Hampshire coast, so they got to support local workers by building a pocket neighborhood of tiny homes, helping…
Whole ecovillage fits inside giant greenhouse: walkable, weatherproof
Thirty years ago, a group of friends in British Columbia set out to create a new kind of ecovillage—and they built it under glass. Located 30 miles south of Vancouver,…
LA family turns unused garage into small home Oasis (before/after)
They were running out of space in their two-bedroom bungalow for a family of four, a home office, and frequent family visitors, so Gennifer Leong-Alvarado and Pastor Alvarado decided to…
They built dream Strawbale Earthship home-studio in 1 weekend
Ken Haggard and Polly Cooper have built natural homes with passive solar techniques and powered by renewables since the seventies, so when in August 1994 a wildfire destroyed their property…
commercial materials used to build 2-story ADU for $30K
Christi Acevedo has spent years machining metal to make furniture so when she wanted to build a fast, fire-resistant, easily-configurable backyard home, she created a prototype from insulated metal panels.…
Builds open-plan home by hand with Japanese-inspired carpentry
Tim Seggerman bought a rundown shack in rural New Jersey to build a house out of simple materials with his own labor. “After clearing away the unhappy rotted house, I…
Didn’t use garage, turned it into his parents’ modern home
To convert a garage into a home, Ramiro Losada-Amor left the structure untouched and dropped a birch box inside to operate as a transforming home within a home. “That box…
Friends couldn’t afford apartments. Bought the building instead
As a housekeeper, Johnny Sanphillippo couldn’t afford to buy an apartment in San Francisco, but then he heard one of his employers talking about wanting to sell his five-unit building.…
7 friends built restoration ecovillage. Outcome 50 years on
In 1994 a group of seven friends began living and farming together after taking over an 80-acre, 1974 organic farm 70 miles north of San Francisco that had been left…