Contain yourself

The image to the left is an interior shot of a home designed by a visionary architect named Jennifer Siegel. The home Ms. Siegel designed here first came to my attention in Dwell magazine and I was reminded of her ideas when I was thinking about sustainability this morning. Sustainability is the new buzzword of the design and architect worlds, and it's a steaming locomotive on its way to you.

I've written for the last couple of days about wasteful practices and their unsustainability over the long term. I think the current housing market mess and mortgage industry debacle are a another symptom of this unsustainability. Housing prices have increased dramatically in the last 20 years. Increased to the point where typical wage earners can no longer afford to buy a home in a desireable part of the country. The market reaction to that unaffordability was to get creative on the financing end of it and the results are splashed across the headlines every morning. Everyone seems hell-bent on fixing the problem by bailing people out of bad mortgages on homes they can't afford. The blame seems to have settled exclusively on the mortgage industry. Oh, there's plenty of blame there, but it's not the whole story. Building costs have soared and it's not due to greed on the part of the building industry either. Concrete really does cost a lot more now than it used to. Ditto lumber and finishes and labor and all the rest. What people consider to be an adequate and appropriate home has reached the point of unsustainability, just like their water use has. It's time, high time, to look at what constitutes a house.

At current rates of population growth, the US will need an additional 427 billion square feet of space by the year 2030. That's a lot of room for a lot of people, most of whom cannot afford to spend $300,000 on a stucco split level on a cul de sac. So what's there to do?

The house above is made from discarded shipping containers. The unintended consequence of our trade imbalance with China is that every day, ships laden with goods arrive in US ports and get unloaded. Because we buy so much more than we sell to them, for most of those containers, it's a one-way trip. So they pile up in New York and LA and Miami and Tampa and San Francisco and New Orleans and they sit there.

A growing group of visionaries is looking to them to solve two sustainability problems at once. How do you build interesting, affordable housing that will allow builders to make enough money that they will build it and what the hell are we going to do with that mountain of shipping containers along the expressway. The answer is build houses. Interesting, beautiful, sustainable houses that people can afford. There is an entire web subculture out there on the topic and two places where I've been reading up on this are a blog called Treehugger (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/01/shipping_contai.php) and an architectural clearinghouse called Fabprefab (http://www.fabprefab.com/fabfiles/containerbayhome.htm).

It is not 1945 anymore and it's time to stop looking at housing and commercial construction as if it were.

This toilet will change your life!

This is the Aquia toilet by Toto (http://www.totousa.com/). What it carries is a technology that new in the US, but is ubiquitous throughout the rest of the developed (and a lot of the developing) world. What our friends at Toto have done is brought this "new" idea in toiletry (is that a proper use of the term?) to the US market and how it hasn't taken off shocks me.

The Aquia is a dual flush toilet. What that means is that the flush button on the top of the tank is split into two sides. Pressing the left side initiates a .9 gallon flush. We'll call that the number one side. Pressing the right side gets you a 1.6 gallon flush and we'll call that the number two side. It makes sense, perfect sense; yet if you ask for one at a Home Depot or a Lowe's you will be met with the blank stare of the tragically unaware.

The United States is on a collision course with a water disaster. The conventional vision of what constitutes a decent lifestyle is unsustainable. The problem is not the US standard of living. The problem is the way Americans use their scarce resources. Real high on that list of misallocated and misunderstood resources is clean, safe tap water. That drinking water gets used to irrigate lawns, and to hose off sidewalks, and to wash cars, and to flush toilets is madness. Madness!

Average, daily, per capita, household water use is estimated to be 69.3 gallons. I live in a city of 250,000 souls and that means we consume on average 17,325,000 gallons for household use every day. But that's using a national statistic to get a local result. The per capita household number in Saint Pete, Florida is actually 89 gallons. That means Saint Pete needs 22,250,000 gallons of water a day for showers, tap water, dishwashers, clothes washers, lawn sprinklers, swimming pools and toilets. That is a lot of water. It's a lot of water that needs to be piped in from counties other than our own. Add in the needs of the 3 and a half million other souls who share Tampa Bay with us and that is a huge amount of fresh water that's piped into this burgeoning region of the country. I'm not the first person to say this, but it can't last. The Florida aquifer where that water comes from is in trouble and there are Draconian measures in the works.

It is past time to rethink the way we use water. Going back to that 69.3 gallon per capita average, 18.5 gallons of that total goes to toilet flushing. 18-and-a-half gallons of fresh, treated, potable water gets fouled every day to dispose of about a quart of waste, pardon my indelicacy. Those 18-and-a-half gallons are a logical place to look to cut back on overall water use. The dual-flush toilet is a perfect step in that direction.

My water-use statistics came from The American Water Works Association, a trade group for the US water industry. You can review their figures yourself and find some great ideas about water conservation on their website, http://www.drinktap.org/. My local use statistics came from the Pinellas County Utilities Commision, http://www.co.pinellas.fl.us/.

Contrary to what you'll hear from the Rush Limbaughs of the world, water conservation is not a concern that's the sole province of the soft-hearted and soft-headed. The water problems the US are steaming toward are real and they will be ugly. However a pretty toilet from a Japanese plumbing company might be enough to hold all that nastiness at bay. For a while anyhow.

Sofas, sofas everywhere but not a place to sit.

I have been on a quest for the right sofa for my living room for the last couple of years, and I'm proving myself to be my own worst client. I can't pick furnishings for myself to save my life. In the course of all of that back and forth I've learned a lot about sofas and even though it hasn't helped me decide between a Mitchell Gold and a Barbara Barry it helps me find better stuff for my clients. So if it's sofa time for you, pay close heed to some tips about what makes a good sofa good in the first place and why good sofas are so bloody expensive.

A sofa starts with a frame. In better furniture, that frame is made from kiln-dried hardwood. These hardwoods are kiln-dried to remove any residual moisture and to prevent later warping or cracking. In less-expensive furniture, that hardwood frame is replaced with furniture-grade plywood. A hardwood or furniture-grade plywood frame is the first thing to look at if this is a piece of furniture that will get a lot of use and that you expect to hold onto for a long time. A good sofa is screwed and glued at its joints and its corners are reinforced with blocks. These are things you cannot see, so ask your salesperson about a sofa's frame construction and you should hear something like what I just wrote. If he stares at you blankly, leave the store immediately and go somewhere else.

If you're looking for something that won't get used a lot, or that you expect to get rid of in a couple of years; a frame made of particle board is for you. The particle board frame won't keep its shape over time and its joints will eventually break. The $7,000 Henredon sofa and the $900 knock off of it at Ikea may look similar on the outside, but it's the insides that count here.

If you spend any time in furniture showrooms, you hear the term "hand tied" bandied about but no one really gets into what it means. What the term refers to is the sofa's suspension system. The suspension is the second element that separates better furniture from cheaper furniture. "Hand Tied" is shorthand for eight-way hand-tied steel-coil system --called this because each steel coil is attached at eight different points to other coils and then the whole system is attached to the frame. This allows for the coils to operate independently, but not too much. The result is called the sofa's "ride," or how it feels when you sit on it. The hand tied method of using coils is regarded by the industry as the best marker of quality and you can be sure that the $7,000 Henredon has hand-tied coils. Down from that is a drop-in coil system where the individual coils are clipped to one another and then clipped to the frame. This system won't last as long and will give a more uneven ride. Finally, our $900 example will likely have what's known as sinuous construction and it will be the shortest-lived of the three methods here. Sinuous, or zig zag, construction uses S-shaped steel wires that run from side to side of the frame. Sinuous suspensions are stiffer and are omnipresent to the point that most people expect a sofa to feel the way it does with one of these suspension systems.

But more than the other two categories, the largest driver of a sofa's price is the fabric it's upholstered in. There is a staggering range of fabric qualities out there. And as is the case with a lot of things, if you don't know what quality is, don't learn or you'll spend fortunes chasing it. An upholstery fabric should be attractive, obviously; but it needs to be resilient and easy to clean as well. The tag on a sofa will tell you how it can be spot cleaned through a series of codes. Guard your sanity and avoid anything labeled "Brush Clean" only.

Always ask how long the lead time is for the delivery if it's a custom piece. Typical turn arounds range anywhere from one month to nine months. Know going in that the minute you customize a piece of furniture is the same minute that it stops being returnable. Think about this for a while and look at the fabric swatch in your own home before you buy anything. Do your homework, pick something and get on with it. That sounds like good advice for me too.

Angst and ennui in a cul de sac

Today's New York Times has a great piece on their website in the form of one of their bloggers, Allison Arieff. Ms. Arieff is the former editor of the great magazine Dwell and she writes about architecture, design and culture. Her blog entry can be found at: http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/is-your-house-making-you-look-fat/index.html

Her topic today, sustainable development, dovetails neatly into my entry yesterday about environmentally-friendly cleaning products and household goods.

The image here of a cul-de-sac'd suburban neighborhood has become a redefinition of the American Dream in the last 50 years or so and the growth of this kind of inefficient development is at the root of not only the environmental crises we face, but I say that it can be faulted for everything from trade imbalances to childhood obesity to school shootings. It is development on an inhuman scale. The conceit it relies upon is the idea that you can cram people into a space and allow them to live in isolation. Neighborhoods such as this one are completely automobile-dependent and the only way a resident can interact with someone who lives 20 feet away is to go out of their way to do so.

So long as this kind of suburban idyll holds its place as an American Ideal, we're doomed. Life in one of these places makes walking anywhere but to the garage difficult and pointless. Since all of the homes in the neighborhood are worth the same amount of money, there can be no economic diversity among its residents. An endless parade of cars and garage doors doesn't lend itself to neighborly behavior. Backyard fences you can't see over keep over-the-back-fence conversations to a minimum.

I live in the Sunbelt, a place whose suburbs and exurbs look just like the photo above. People line up to move into these neighborhoods and in exchange get to live in solitude among strangers a half an hour from the grocery store and an hour from work. I live in an area that gets around 50 inches of rain a year. Those 50 inches fall mostly between the months of May through September with nary a drop in between. Yet, due in a huge part to the inefficient use of the soul-deadening cul de sac school of suburban planning, we face chronic water shortages. Thousands of acres of small lawns that need to be irrigated with potable water cause these water shortages. The sprawl of suburbia is as unsustainable ecologically as it is economically as it is psychologically.

But there's hope. The sale of new homes fell by 26 per cent last year country-wide. Yet, in order to keep up with projected population growth, the US will need an additional 427 billion square feet of space by the year 2030.

Maybe the upside of a down housing market is that it presents a rare and valuable opportunity to re-think the way that we, as a society, house people. Maybe development on a scale that accommodates human needs over automotive needs is something to explore now that there's a lull in the action. Imagine what would happen if somebody started to build communities that actually built communities. Imagine.

$9 window cleaner? Give me a break!

The same magazine I mentioned yesterday, Domino (http://www.dominomag.com/), has a feature this month on environmentally-friendly cleaning products and it has me thinking.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the "green" bandwagon all of the sudden and it's about time. I think it's important to use resources wisely but a lot of times; the quest for new, "green" products is nothing more than a reconfigured quest for money, the old-fashioned green. Environmental degradation is caused by consumerism and I don't think that the answer to it lies in more consumerism. A nine dollar bottle of non-toxic window cleaner won't really do anything but lighten wallets and make a lot of the purchasers feel better about themselves. I saw an ad today for canvas grocery bags that retail for $26. So what if the cotton they're made from is organic? $26 for a grocery bag? Wouldn't that money be better-spent on the groceries the bag is intended to carry?

Somebody who thinks nothing of plunking down $26 for a grocery bag is the same kind of person who can be counted on to drive a Hummer or a Suburban, and that's a whole other problem. The problem at hand there though is the irritating polyethylene grocery bags that clog waterways and don't decompose. So the answer is to stop using them. So either say "paper" when the kid at the check out asks you if you want paper or plastic. Or better yet, say "neither" and hand him a stack of your bags from the last time you were there. But I guess there's no glamour in that. No opportunity for sanctimony or martyrdom.

The solution is not to buy more crap. Similarly, the solution is not to suffer needlessly. Wouldn't it make more sense to clean your windows with a one dollar bottle of white vinegar and yesterday's newspaper rather than a nine dollar bottle of something touted as green? Isn't it better environmentally and fiscally to take the eight dollar difference and pop it into a savings account? The basic cleaners your grandmother swore by (Fels-Naptha soap, white vinegar, baking soda, etc.) are still around and still as effective as they ever were. Especially the Fels-Naptha, I swear by it. What they lack in cachet they make up for in effectiveness and sensibility. They're also environmentally responsible.

Current environmental challenges are real and confronting them is not something that can be brushed off or wished away. As an individual, I can use less stuff and think about the impact of the stuff I do use once I'm done using it. That kind of behavioral change is subtle and quiet. Further, it's in my best interest economically to make changes like that. Its very subtlety and enlightened self-interest makes it run counter to consumerism gone wild and that, I think, is the key.