John Stein is into demolitions, but not in the way one might think.  The founder and president of California-based Kirei USA has a knack for finding the possibilities inherent in the unwanted.

This vision shows clearly in every Kirei product, including the newest line, Windfall.  These engineered panels are produced in partnership with Windfall Lumber, which takes Douglas & Hemlock Fir from deconstructed buildings in the Pacific Northwest and brings the reclaimed wood to fresh, new life.

“It’s great to reuse demolition material that would otherwise take up space in the landfill,” says Mr. Stein.  “Having it become beautiful wood panels is even better.  This is old-growth wood that just can’t be found any more, and we get to bring it to designers.”

Windfall is manufactured in the United States using low-VOC adhesives.  The reclaimed wood is milled into strips of differing width, which are then randomly stacked to form the panels and cut to size.  Panels are available either solid or 3-ply with a NUAF/FSC-certified core.  They may come unfinished, with a clear coat that shows off the natural grain, or stained and prefinished in Anthracite, Mocha, Ivory, and Leather colors.  The result adds to any interior.

And as Windfall gives stylish new life to reclaimed wood, so the other Kirei lines bring new purpose to certain types of agricultural waste.  Kirei Board, Kirei Coco Tiles, and Kirei Wheatboard use reclaimed agricultural fiber from plants commonly grown for food around the world.

After harvest, waste from sorghum (an edible grass), coconut, and wheat plants is usually thrown into landfills or burned.  Now much of this unused material is removed from the waste stream, reducing landfill use and air pollution while giving rural farmers a new source of revenue.  Rapidly renewable or FSC-certified wood are used as bonding strips, greatly reducing the need for newly harvested wood for building.

Manufacture can be more involved than with particle board.  For example, with Kirei Board the sorghum stalks are compressed, washed, and woven into sheets.  The latter are then stacked and heat-pressed with a formaldehyde-free adhesive to create blocks, which are cut to desired size.

Kirei offers a similar product made of Moso bamboo.  The plantations from which this fiber is taken are generally reclaimed farmland, which helps to preserve uncut habitat.  Panels are available in a wide variety of colorways, including the luscious looking new Chocolate, probably the favorite out of all the bamboo treatments that I’ve yet seen.

These four products are suitable for architectural millwork, cabinetry, flooring (though not in high traffic areas), wall displays or covering, furniture, and decorative objects – in short, any application where one would normally think of using wood.

To round out this versatility Kirei came out with their Canamo Hemp Panels.  These are made with a no-added-formaldehyde resin and reclaimed hemp hurd fiber left over from fabric & seed oil manufacture: over 70% post-industrial recycled content.  The panels are produced in 48”x96” size and are offered in a variety of thicknesses, all left unfinished so that designers may best tailor the product to individual need.  According to Kirei, the hemp panels may be used for the purposes above.  Ceiling panels are also available.

Collectively, the Kirei philosophy may yield several LEED credits for one’s project, which in itself is wonderful, but there’s much more to it that that.

The word kirei is a Japanese adjective signifying many meanings, including Clean, Pure, Beautiful, and Truthful.  Under John Stein’s direction the company strives to embody its namesake as an ideal.  His business aims to stimulate the economic activity of its source regions by providing new jobs at fair market wages.  By using recycled products and efficient, sustainable practices, Kirei works to lessen humanity’s impact on natural resources while contributing to clean, healthy, and aesthetically pleasing indoor environments… with a eye to the latter quality.

“Green has to be beautiful,” says Mr. Stein.

“If you’re going to do green for green’s sake you’re going to have a very limited market – people who have health issues or people with a conscience.  If you have beautiful materials that happen to be green, then really they’re open to everybody.  I regard it almost as a gateway drug to other green activities.”

With the visual appeal of the Kirei product, perhaps we’ll see many new converts to the sustainable ethic.  Let’s hope so.

~ Emerald

Images courtesy of Kirei USA.

There are modular homes and modular walls and modular floors…  but have you seen a modular plant?  No?  I hadn’t either.

But the clever folks at DIRTT Environmental Solutions looked into their imaginations and saw a vertical garden: rows and ranks of pretty, VOC-absorbing plants marching up any given wall.  Then Sustainable Industries looked at Breathe and named it one of the Top Ten Building Products of 2011.

So what is this thing?

Its parent company calls Breathe a “simple system for incorporating plants into DIRTT walls… to bring nature indoors and beautify and detoxify interior spaces.”  From a home-owner’s perspective, the modular planter looks like a splendid kitchen herb garden… or a sunroom fixture… or an arresting floral display in a well-lit entranceway.  If mounted to the wall about four to six feet upward, it could be a boon for pet owners wishing to keep their house plants safe from marauding cats or dogs.

In addition to easy installment on DIRTT modular units the “living wall” can be mounted to any pre-existing flat, vertical building surface: a desirable treatment for dull, bare concrete or brick walls with nothing cheerful to say otherwise.  Designers could content themselves with the simple statement of a single row of plants or potentially convert an entire wall into a soothing, visually delightful space.

Imagine banks of fragrant herbs or a living patchwork of flowers gracing the walls of a previously bare courtyard or boring employee break room.  Wouldn’t that help company morale?

Imagine a relief of green writ large upon the so-often-uninspiring walls of academic institutions.  A green school: lovely!  Look at the pretties!

There’s a lot of potential for this product just waiting to be tapped.  Take a moment to come see and find out more.

~ Emerald

Go to the local – or chain – hardware store and take a stroll to the paint section, where rows upon rows and literally thousands of color choices may await customers. What’s in that paint?  In many cases, that information can be more than difficult to unearth.

In the vast majority of cases the base material is latex, supplemented by a witch’s brew of chemicals to achieve consistency, color, and so forth, produced with petro-chemical or synthetic ingredients.  The result, whatever the formula, is often toxic.  Who wants that?

Florian Speier and Jessica Pfohl are among those looking for something more.  Out of frustration at the “greenwashing and lack of ingredient transparency in the paint industry,” the husband and wife team founded Unearthed Paints with the determination to help change the industry.

“We believe that consumers have a right to know what ingredients are in their paints,” proclaims the company website.  “We proudly list all the ingredients in our paint on the front of every label.  We hope that other paint manufacturers will follow our lead so that consumers can make informed decisions about the paints they bring into their homes.”

So, what’s in their paint?  Unearthed carries natural paint, meaning paint made with ingredients such as earth & mineral pigments, marble, clay, and chalk.  The medium  comes to the consumer accompanied by a full ingredient disclosure.  It is truly 100% VOC-free and biodegradable.

While clay and mineral paints have never gone out of popularity in Europe and Japan, here in America such natural finishes have been largely forgotten.  Florian and Jessica hope to change that.

After months of relationship-building with the German company Kreidezeit, arrangements were made earlier this year to begin importing the latter’s natural finishes to the U.S., where the product was rebranded for American consumers.  Unearthed Paints was born.  Now its creators are in the building process, attracting vendors and the attention of the press, with the aim of winning some market share away from an industry dominated by latex paint.

There are six types of paint offered by the company.  Four are sold as dry powder, to be mixed on site: clay paint and its thicker variation, clay roll-on plaster, Vega Paint (a vegan update on traditional milk paint recipes), and plant glue paint.  Pit lime paint and Gecko Paint are sold as liquid bases.

Similar care is taken for remainder of the product line.  On offer are three types of plaster in various textures, two natural wood finishes, along with primers, thinners, and a selection of pigment used to infuse color.

The goal of sustainability is carried into every aspect of the business, even unto consideration for energy use.  While many of the ingredients in conventional latex paints – such as petroleum products and titanium dioxide – require an energy-intensive process to produce, natural paints, in contrast, are minimally processed and made with ingredients which are abundantly available (clay, chalk) or recycled (reclaimed Italian marble).  To complement to this sourcing, Unearthed’s paint is manufactured in a carbon-neutral facility and shipped via carbon-offset transport.

The founders of Unearthed also translate their philosophy into action through their Rainforest Pledge: a program currently dedicated to helping preserve the rainforest in Paraguay.  For every square foot of Unearthed paints, plasters, or wood finishes purchased by a customer, the company will purchase one square foot of rain forest and donate it back to the Enxet and Ayoreo tribes, which are indigenous to the region.

Details of the pledge can be found at the Unearthed Paints’ website.  Once there, wander around a bit and learn about this inspiring company, which is definitely (pardon the chestnut) walking its talk.

The little wooden robot sits there, head cocked, arms outstretched, vacant drilled eyes staring into space.  Its expression is puzzled and innocent.  It looks like it wants a hug.  It’s cute.

Sometimes, in the earnest seriousness of striving to live green, we forget our sense of humor.  Marjolaine Poulin of M Design hasn’t forgotten… and she loves nothing better than to make other people smile, hence the little army of wooden robots marching out of her workshop in El Salvador.

Marjolaine (“Mao”) has taken scrap wood & discarded furniture and raised them both into art.

A native of Quebec, Canada, Mao splits her time between Montreal and El Salvador, always looking for inspiration.  Her introduction to woodworking came in 2004 in Guatemala, where she learned classical bamboo carpentry from a Taiwanese master.  Shortly afterward she began crafting her own designs hoping to promote bamboo’s many advantages as a building material in Central America.

Bamboo, a fast-growing, imminently sustainable crop, grows in diverse climates and after treatment is strong, durable, yet lightweight.  Discoveries of its usefulness and applications continue to expand.

“In the United States and France,” Mao said, “It is possible to get houses made entirely of bamboo, which are earthquake and cyclone-resistant and internationally certified.”

Her own work with the material is on a more modest scale, consisting of beautiful furniture crafted from bamboo and tropical wood.

Mao has recently turned her attention to a problem local to Montreal: unwanted furniture abandoned on the city streets.  As though collecting lost puppies, she rescues the unloved, discarded furniture and gathers it in her workshop, where it waits to be transformed.

“I walk around my workshop and try to mix and match,” she explained.  “To repair or repurpose old things with more old things.  To be able to sell my pieces at a reasonable price, I try to buy as little new material as possible, which means I need to be really creative and reuse as much as possible.”

This pastime blossomed in 2010 with the Scrap Project, an exhibition of Mao-transformed furniture, the second edition of which took place this past August.  The positive feedback from the show’s first run freed her this year to explore new techniques and let herself slip into the creative process.  And what are her plans for 2012?

“My Montréal’s workshop is full of amazing abandoned pieces of furniture and I can’t wait to start working on them next summer,” the artist said.  “I still have a lot of concepts in my head that I haven’t had time to bring to life, so that’s what the Scrap project 2012 will be about: making it real.”

For Mao, new is overrated.

“It makes me so angry to see how much stuff people in the first world are throwing away,” she said.  “It’s unbelievable how much a human can buy and send to the dump every year.  I wanted to do my part and feel better about the issue.”

Despite that anger – or perhaps as a salve upon it – there is a deliberate lightness to her work, which is full of opposites and contradictions, whimsical robots, clean lines next to old textures.  The unexpected often brings a smile, and it is that smile that opens doors in the mind to new ideas, like sustainability.

More information about Scrap Project 2011 is available on Mao’s blog.

~ Emerald

This is before.  Isn’t that a weird location for the sink?  Not to mention the majorly blah nature of that white and beige scheme!

So look what we did….

Talk about a 180°!  The clients had already picked out their appliances, and knew exactly what they wanted for the cabinet color (off a picture frame they had, no less).  My task was to figure out a way to tuck it all in there – without having it come off as crowded or jumbled looking – and to integrate other materials in so the kitchen still felt open and light.   It was quite the puzzle, but I think we pulled it off.  Cork flooring (which I promise is less yellow looking in person), composite countertops, and glass backsplash tile bring a lot of color and brightness into the space, not to mention sustainability.

We even managed to fit a full sized washer and dryer into the space.

Now THAT was a trick!  Kudos to Keith, the cabinet maker, for making real what I could only sketch out on paper.

Thanks for visiting!

Rachel

Sometimes an object is so stunning it can’t be properly caught on camera, and that is surely the case with Pietre Preziose, the latest surfacing material produced by the family-owned Italian firm, OKITE.  Pictures just don’t it justice.  As it is composed of natural quartz and resin, the translucent Pietre Preziose fills with ambient light from its environment and becomes truly luminous.  How brilliant is that?

This OKITE product, as with the rest of the company’s line, is available in a choice of thicknesses and can be cut and edged however needed for one’s project.  In addition to the lovely stuff pictured above, the company also produces a line of recycled surfacing.

OKITE product is available in a range of custom colors, from soothing white into earthy colors through bright, saturated tones and on up into deep, almost startling tones such as Prisma Blue Capri (pictured).

Everything the company produces can earn LEED credits.  Their surfacing does not emit any gas or VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) and is certified by GreenGuard Environmental Institute.  Due to its high structural strength, OKITE product does not require any substrate of plywood, MDF, or composite wood – and, as the latter often contains urea-formaldehyde resins, this is good thing.

At the end of its lifecyle OKITE stonework can be crushed or recycled to obtain concrete or roadfill.  Stonework which has been cared for properly will retain its original finish and properties throughout its use, and so can be repurposed as flooring, vanity tops, backsplashes, windowsills, or mosaics… to name just a few possibilities.

But to really appreciate just how gorgeous this product looks, take a moment to browse around the OKITE website.  It’s worth the time taken.

~ Emerald

Image via Pinterest

Gray is the perfect neutral, but it can feel cold and lifeless on it’s own.  Yellow is cheerful and bright, but it can also seem like you decorated with your kids crayons when paired with other bight colors.  However, combine the two and you have a perfectly simple, yet strikingly sophisticated, color scheme.

Image via Sow Kindness, Gather Love

See what I mean?  That room is nothing but gray, except for two yellow pillows, a vase, and a few bright yellow chrysanthemums.  Imagine how blah that room would be without them!

Image via It's a Bride's Life

This balancing act works beautifully with clothing too.  Have a plain grey suit?  Wear a yellow blouse under it, or accessorize with a yellow purse.  A grey dress could go from blah to brilliant with the addition of a yellow scarf or belt.  The trick is to keep the yellow to about 30% or less of the overall color, whether it is an outfit or a room.

Image via Etsy

Why do I bring this up?  I’m currently working on a bathroom remodel for a client, and after putting together the tile and countertop materials, I realized that, with one exception, I still had nothing but white and gray.  The exception was a tiny bit of golden yellow in the glass tile for the backsplash.  So I started digging around my samples, and came up with a matching butter yellow liner tile that I could use to frame the glass tile as an accent on the shower walls.  But it still wasn’t quite enough.  So after a little more looking around, I realized that the floor tile was available in the same butter yellow, as well as the gray I had already chosen.  Voila!  Now we are creating a “rug” from the yellow floor tile to place in front to the shower.   It is all about the balance.

Image credit unknown

So how about you?   Have you ever tried this combination before?  Would you want to?

Thanks for visiting!

Rachel

These are luscious floors.

How often does one get the chance to say that about something under one’s feet?   Luscious.   Yet the creations of DuChateau Floors evoke that word, and in addition serve as a reminder that an environmentally-friendly room does not necessarily preclude classical beauty and – dare we say it? – a gentle opulence.

The secret is in the polish.  While polyurethane, acrylic, and aluminum finished floors are prevalent in the United States, DeChateau offers a refreshing alternative: a floor crafted of new FSC-certified European wood that is distressed, finished with hard wax oil, smoked, and brushed to reproduce that wonderful age-old, worn, antique patina that speaks of history.

The hard wax oil is zero-VOC and preservative-free.  As you can see, it makes for a lustrous finish that brings out all the beauty of the wood… its depth, its grain, and sheen.

Shown here are examples from the company’s Riverstone collection.  I think the Seine & Thames floors particularly evoke the passage of time, while Arno seems more, well…  jazzy.

There are eight collections in all, each with their own voice and each easily spot-repaired with a minimum of bother and fuss.  (A real boon!)  Well-kept, maintained, oiled, the wood will only deepen in beauty.  Imagine using it as wall paneling or, for greater inspiration, check out the creativity of Musa Design in Seattle, WA!

To learn more about these durable, eco-friendly floors, please visit DuChateau’s website.

~ Emerald

Hear that?

You don’t?

Perfect!

Milano Wall

That sound you don’t hear is Zephyr’s new Next Generation Europa line of range hoods.

Napoli Island

The reason you hear hardly a thing isn’t because the hood is so loud it drowns out your smoke alarm when you set the bacon on fire (come on, it’s happened to all of us, right?).  No, it’s because these range hoods are equipped with Zephyr’s DCBL™ Suppression technology.

What’s that you ask?  Well, let’s take a look under the hood, shall we?

Modena Wall

By utilizing an on-board computer, and a DC, brushless motor (the industries first), Zephyr is able to generate precise wattage and more torque at lower RPMs.  This allows for both greater air movement, and a significantly quieter operation.  At its lowest setting – which is plenty strong enough for standard cooking needs – you might just forget it is even on!

Zephyr has another trick up their sleeve, which manages to make this hood as energy efficient as it is quiet.  If you look at the photo above, you will see four lights shining down from the canopy.  Those are ultra low energy Bloom™ LEDs, which are standard with the Next Generation Europa line.  Cool to the touch, but warm to the eye, these LEDs provide an evenly distributed light to the cook top below, without adding heat to the kitchen.  Best of all, they are also dimmable!

Verona Wall

Of course, speaking of LEDs, check out what the Verona range hood can do…  (cue theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind)

Yep, it has an LED lighted edge that shifts from color to color while you cook.  Dang!

Napoli Island

Whether you like it or not, the range hood you select will have a significant impact on the overall look of your kitchen.  Isn’t it nice that you can now have an environmentally friendly option that is also friendly to your ears AND your eyes?

Visit the Zephyr website to learn more about the Next Generation Europa line of range hoods, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter to catch up with their latest news.

Thanks for visiting!

Rachel

Full disclosure – Although I was not paid for this post (I never am), I was invited to participate in a two day Discover Zephyr event in San Francisco, which is where I learned a lot I didn’t know about how these hoods work, and also where I found out just how quiet they can be!

This is the first tour for the Newport Beach Green Home.

As you can see, this project is still in the early stages of construction.

Man, have you ever seen more beautiful framing?  Seriously, this stuff is a work of art.  Almost a shame to cover it up with drywall.  Of course, if we didn’t, I sorta wouldn’t have a job, would I?

Lots of people showed up.

Here is John Steed, the builder/general contractor, telling an admiring crowd about that awesome framing.  We also had Laura Minott Sanders, the project manager from Jeff Jeanette Architects, the homeowners Wayne and Shannon, and yours truly there to explain our respective parts of the project.  We all got to answer a lot of good questions, which is always fun.

Here is my little contribution to the tour.  A table full of shiny, pretty things!  Samples are so much fun, no?

Oh, and you know how I was just going on about how fantastic the framing was?  Well, if you thought that was great, check out this TEMPORARY staircase.

Now that’s a topflight flight of stairs!

By the way, we were actually having a debate about what to cover that adjacent wall with.  Although the solution is at hand, I thought it also might be fun to see what my readers could come up with.  So here are the parameters:

The staircase will be made of steel with strand bamboo treads.  The flooring will also be strand bamboo, in a medium tone.  We are looking for a material that is durable, cleanable, sustainable (of course), and has a great visual impact – without being too busy.  There will be a lot of light coming from a window wall above.

So, get out your thinking caps, and see what you can come up with!

To find out more about this project, visit the Newport Green Home website, or follow the project on Facebook.