This is Eco-Architectural Digest material. Precious.
$1M for that ugly pile of junk? A complete joke. Just like all this "sustainable" hype, it's for rich poseurs.
2
It would be lovely if Mr Hill applied some of his genius to solve the rampant homelessness in Hawaii. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/us/hawaii-homeless-criminal-law-sitti...
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If you are looking for examples of where to start in off-grid living, it helps to see what people who actually do just that on local incomes are doing. High-cost, clever, stowable furnishings made far from the place of use carry a large and unseen carbon footprint, the same for everything else in this house. Multipurpose space assignment is hardly new, go to places like Abaco in the Bahamas where the locals live and see how they do that using more locally- sourced material. The recycled VW Thing is a clever re-purposing of a vintage vehicle, but it cost many times its market value just engineering the electric motor and battery re-fit.
4
Nice idea for a prototype. Show me you can do this for $120,000 and I'm in. Nobody with $1M in mind to spend will want this house (and I like it), no matter how clever and green it is.
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Rich white person from the mainland spends over a million dollars on a luxury vacation home in his idea of paradise. This has absolutely zero support from locals. I can't believe there is an article about this joke.
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This makes me think of the folks out on Montauk who have a professional gardener to grow their flowers and vegetables. But it is how we live now and it's pathetic. Sad and pathetic.
11
Ruminating on an effort by Yvon Chouinard to build a sustainable surfing shack on the California shore, the journalist Craig Vetter called this architectural style "conspicuous denial." The notion that rich people go out, build things they call "sustainable," and the result is an exemplar of anything but rich people saying "look at me" is preposterous.
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If you want to prove how well you can live "off the grid", go to Alaska or Saudi Arabia. Doesn't "off the grid" mean you don't need to use utilities like electricity and water? When the average low temperature in January is 65, and the average high is 85, you don't need heat - most homes in Maui don't even have heating systems unless they are above 3000 feet. And the same goes for air conditioning outside of the desert-like tourist places on the southern beaches, not Haiku, where even 90 degree summer days are always cooled by the relentless winds. You can live just as comfortably in a tent in Haiku as this guy does, as long as you furnish it with $6000 bathtubs. Many people use only outdoor showers, without heat, as it is plenty hot enough to enjoy the lukewarm water. As to harvesting rainwater - give me a break. It rains daily, even in summer. Irrigation is only needed in the southern desert places, not Haiku.
This whole article is about how the rich congratulate themselves on being eco conscious.
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Frugality is rarely luxurious. Spend a million bucks just building your home ? Of course you can get luxury. Even Tesla owners think they are getting luxury and helping the planet off the grid. The real stories from around the world are not glamorous enough to get recognition ; their pictures are rarely a million bucks in the making.
13
The title of the slide show would be more accurate reading: The Sustainability of Luxury. $6000+ for a tub? $5,500 for a sofa? $415 for a non-descript light fixture? $4,000+ for a pop-up table? Some people have more money than sense (or taste) - sorry Mr. Hill.
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I visited Kauai several years ago, and from the warm welcome I experienced there from the locals, I can’t imagine this same property finding a “home” on the “Garden Island” as Kauai is also called. Yes, they have a Four Seasons property and the high-end lifestyle afforded by life in Princeville, but everywhere I heard the same refrain that the island was one of the last vestiges for preserving Hawaii’s heritage before the 1% started taking it over acre by acre over years. More than 80% of Kauai is protected lands by the Robinson Family Trust set up many generation ago, ensuring the natural beauty endures as far and wide as possible for perpetuity. A visit to the National Tropical Botanic Garden is a must.
7
As my native Hawaiian relatives who can no longer afford to own a home in their own ancestral lands (Maui) would say, "Haole go home!"
10
Where exactly is one' native or ancestral land? Native land that confers some kind of right to live on it with priority over others who may happen to have more money, but they get second choice because they competing with natives?
Your ancestors got there first, so you get to exclude others, including classes of second class or sudsequent ancestors. For me, born in Rhode Island and growing up there until college, maybe I am in line for a mansion in Newport or a place in Watch Hill Do I have a priority right there? Or Scotland where almost all of my ancestors came from? Maybe a castle there with a large preserve. Or Ireland where my wife's family came from? Or New York where i worked for six years out of school. and my wife was born and grew up? I am voting for mid-town east Or maybe Arizona where we have lived for about the last 26 years? Paradise Valley would be cool. Or even California where our son was born and we lived for about 4 years, and we kinda still live there now with a second home? If we have some kind of prioritization scheme that says people with historical ties get first dibs on living spaces, it would be a better system than the current system of money deciding right? We would just have to have a "decider" who can tell us where our best and strongest claim is.
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Yes, it's a cool house for rich people. I live (and grew up on) the Big Island, and I'm familiar with housing issues.
And I'm familiar with outsiders who blow in with lots of money, buy up land, and build fancy houses -- exacerbating the social divisions that are already here.
Maui, I think, is a lost cause. It's gone to the rich.
Anyway, here's an architect actually doing some good:
http://www.civilbeat.org/2018/03/this-honolulu-architect-designs-low-cos...
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Thanks for the link! Awesome article about a truly caring person doing important housing work!
2
I was thrilled to have an opportunity to see all the sustainability but it was too hard to find so being the judgmental person I am I gave up. Nice view though
1
I don't get how the pair of $6,000 bathtubs constitute living off the grid or "sustainability."
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This is beautiful and, One hopes, translates to more affordable projects (with greater density and more green space preserved.) Done right, sustainable and net zero building can be both affordable and luxurious. Carbon pricing, done right, will drive investment to sustainable technologies. Support Carbon Fee and Dividend at citizensclimatelobby.org so we can all afford clean energy and green building.
4
Carbon fee won't be done right. It's an illusion of sustainability just like this house. Sure, it works for one elite rich person, but does no good for the other 99%.
On the other hand, this project does provide many examples of how to live. And how not to. Now if a building like this had been created as a community center or shelter for the residents, or even a service department, it would have provided a much greater benefit and really qualified as sustainability.
Build this out of recycled shipping containers, use the collected rainwater to irrigate a farm to supply local vegetables, and use locally produced furnishings and it possibly could be a successful model for sustainable living.
I believe the intent was to do good, but in the end turned into an example of wrong reasons to do things. Otherwise, instead of flaunting his mission gone awry, perhaps he should have just kept his private things private.
3
$5,500 per sofa? Must be nice.
12
Please stop.
There is nothing sustainable about carving up more land for a vacation house. Exactly zero.
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You might be right. But outside of giving the money away to replant native forests, or create water projects and provide solar panels to off-grid schools in poor countries, where does a wealthy person park capital in a way that is less harmful? Certainly not mutual funds, US Treauries or the like. That said, rehabbing an old house using green materials and sustainable design would be way better than building from scratch.
4
There is nothing sustainable about what humankind is doing, except for making whatever game effort they can to address what they perceive to be problems, and attempting to solve them. This is exercising hope in the face of what to some, myself included, appear insurmountable odds.
1
Cool...groovy even. Maybe HI can become as unaffordable as Key West and SFO. Filled up with millionaires and the "help" and peasant class can live somewhere else. What a perfect world, innit!?
12
Hawai'i had long become unaffordable for us locals......thanks to 'sustainable' minded technophiles with $$$ to spare.. Thus, I no longer can afford to go home in more ways than just money. Not interested in ruining the islands further.
2
New Zealand, take note and wise up. The rich and super-rich are buying up huge swaths, building their palaces ("sustainable" and otherwise), and driving prices up all over the place. Your islands are in jeopardy; you just don't know it yet.
1
Beautiful? Yes. But “sustainability” when it is accessible to a tiny fraction of the population? No way. Show us what you can build in the $300,000-500,000 range.
20
And the $125,000-250,000 range.
4
Is it really sustainable to build oneself a luxury serving home? And in Hawaii, no less! Is the owner is flying there on a plane fueled by his own sense of self-satisfaction (to steal a line from vintage 90s Simpsons)?
Perhaps one reason so many people think concern for sustainability is the purview of a smug elite is precisely because of stuff like this?
25
My husband was born and raised in Hawaii--third generation (sansei) Japanese American, whose mother was born and raised and worked in a sugar cane plantation on the Big Island. We spend a lot of time in Hawaii. I get tired of reading articles written by non-locals who buy up big acreage and live richly. Locals can't and don't live like this. "Whales and rainbows, wind and waves." Not once does Hill mention the PEOPLE. They are wonderful, they are diverse, they have a rich and difficult history on the islands, much of which was. admittedly, at the expense of the original inhabitants (and true to form, it was the white people who created most of the horror). The Japanese, the Chinese, the Filipino, the Portuguese did not go there to build big houses on multiple acreage. They went there to work. Furthermore, it is not easy for the indigenous Hawaiians--the kanaka maoli-- to live in a place that is THEIRS but that is being bought up by rich non-locals. "One million dollars, not as inexpensive as I had hoped." Plus the $250,000 for the acreage. Oh, please.
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In reality nobody is native to Hawaii, certainly not the Japanese.
3
To me it looks like an enormous investment of time, money and resources for the illusion of sustainability.
39
Consumerism is not sustainable.
33
Difficult to not see this whole thing as designed more to give its owner a warm and fuzzy feeling than to actually be environmentally friendly. If you really want to save energy, more than 90% of Americans (not even talking about the rest of the world) use, maybe stop flying from New-York to Hawaii every year? You can also avoid building a 4-bedroom house as a secondary home.
But it is a cool house.
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