ABC Green Home Brand Expands
Green Home Builder
June 16, 2015
On June 9 of last year, the ABC Green Home 2.0 broke ground in Walnut, Calif. The multi-generational two-story home spanning 2,400 square feet is the second home in the ABC Green Home series. The first ABC Green Home was built and exhibited in the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, Calif., during the 2013 Solar Decathlon. At the end of this summer, that first home will be deconstructed and moved, and the recycled products will be used to build two houses on a lot in Santa Ana. Both of these houses, like all houses within the ABC Green Home brand, will be zero net energy and veteran housing specific.
The ABC Green Home 2.0 is a collective action that’s currently being built by Habitat for Humanity and was designed by Manny Gonzalez’s team at KTGY Group Architecture + Planning. The project’s presenting sponsors are Southern California Edison and the Southern California Gas Company.
As one home in a series of projects designed to demonstrate the best practices in high performance American homebuilding, the ABC Green Home 2.0 is backed by more than 70 manufacturers and design team partners who are As a collaboration with Habitat for Humanity of Orange County and all of us here at Peninsula Publishing, the distinctively styled, two-story homes will be located on an infill lot at the southwest corner of West Truslow and South Highland avenues in Fullerton, Calif. This will be the third project to be built as part of the ABC Green Home series under the head of Peninsula Publishing and Green Home Builder Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Nick Slevin.
These homes will be a showcase of some of today’s most modern sustainable homebuilding elements. Designed from the ground up to optimize advanced sustainability and energy-efficient components. The four bedroom ABC Green Homes 3.0 project feature universal livability that will embrace the positive elements of nature such as capturing and utilizing gentle breezes to cool and constantly freshen the home’s interior.
“When designing a sustainable home, or any structure, nature provides architects with an abundance of elements that can improve the home’s livability such as enhancing interior air quality while at the same time reducing energy use,” explains John Danielian, AIA, LEED AP, principal of Danielian Associates. “Our design of these very special homes will, among other livable features, optimize the capture and circulation of air to naturally cool the interior and ensure that the air quality is healthy.”
Another green design feature of the ABC Green Homes 3.0 series—one of many—is in response to today’s campaign to reduce water waste and consumption. It is a simple but creative “rain gutter” that collects and directs rain to a receptacle on the ground that holds the “gray water” until used to irrigate the drought resistant landscape when necessary.
The homes with two-car garages feature sharply angled roof lines that create dynamic curb appeal as well as shade overhangs to block the sun rays from invading the home’s interior, reducing the solar heat affect. The south-facing roof areas will be the perfect location for the solar panels that will add to the home’s sustainable footprint.
As a true multigenerational home, ABC Green Home 3.0 includes on the ground floor a completely separate one-bedroom “multi-gen suite” of 431 square feet with a comfortable living room, kitchenette, full bath, washer/dryer, and it will have its own exterior patio and outside entrance for ultimate privacy. Lead Danielian designers Louis Bretana and Joe Digrado, AIA, call it a home within a home. The unit can be home to a veteran living with his family or to a caregiver for a veteran.
Both Danielian and Habitat for Humanity have experience building homes for veterans. Danielian, which is providing its design services for the ABC Green Home 3.0 pro bono, is also involved in designing the 300+ unit March Veterans’ Village near the March Air Force Base in Riverside County.
Habitat for Humanity designed and built a neighborhood of 27 for-sale homes in San Juan Capistrano for veterans and their families with an emphasis on housing wounded veterans. The veteran who will live in ABC Green Home 3.0 will be selected by working closely with representatives of the Armed Forces.
