michelle kaufmann designs

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Last month one of our favorite landscape designers, Margie Grace of Grace Design Associates, was honored with two prestigious awards from the Association of Professional Landscape Designers for her work on a custom Sunset Breezehouse home we built in Santa Barbara.  In addition to winning the Association’s Gold Award for Residential Design, Margie was also named APLD’s “Designer of the Year.” Using some very creative, beautiful, and green solutions, Margie and her team managed to take a a gently sloping, flat, heavily excavated and re-compacted city lot and transform it into a completely natural looking site, making it appear as though the house had grown out of an “already existing” landscape.

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My family lives in Iowa and Kevin’s lives in Florida and Canada, so it is impossible for us to get together with our whole family for the holidays, so we choose instead to get together with our families at other times of the year, and spend the holidays with chosen friends as family who are closer to home. We spent this Christmas with our dear friends, Ellen Rockne and Brian Andreas and their amazingly lovely, warm and witty family and group of friends. It was such a gift to be a member of their tribe. While they started as clients, they quickly became friends, and chosen family.

Keep reading to see a few more photos from our special holiday get together or click here to see the entire album on Flickr.

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Officially, California is the Golden State, but with all the sustainable design innovation taking place here, green is now giving gold a run for its money.  Just check out this month’s issue of California Home + Design Magazine; it’s brimming with inspiring examples of green building and design, including the California Academy of Sciences’ brand new home in Golden Gate Park and some of the fantastic design behind San Francisco’s big 4 day Slow Food Nation celebration. So we are delighted to see that the issue also features one of our favorite Sunset Breezehouse homes, located in beautiful Santa Barbara, in a gorgeous eight page spread, full of photos by our favorite photographer, John Swain. See and read the whole article for yourself by clicking here.

Here’s a sneak peak at the kitchen of the custom Sunset Breezehouse that will be open to the public tomorrow starting at 10am in Santa Barbara. We’ve depicted the anatomy of this green room based on our 5 EcoPrinciples - smart design, eco materials, energy efficiency, water conservation, and healthy environment - each of which we incorporated into the design of this gorgeous kitchen. This visual explanation of the room’s anatomy makes it easy to identify and understand all of it’s sustainable design elements it holds. Keep your eyes here for more of our anatomy lessons based on green rooms from some of the other homes we’ve designed and built so far. We promise they’ll be way more fun than anything you learned in your high school anatomy class.

Photo by John Swain

Construction homes in a factory offers so many advantages over traditional on-site construction that it’s sometimes hard for us here at MKD to understand why the industry as a whole still clings to the stick-built model. Factory construction is faster, cost-saving, less wasteful by 50 to 70 percent, and results in better quality homes. Within the controlled environment of the factory we can precision cut every piece of wood that goes into a home, store leftover material for use in the next house coming down the line, and install everything from finishes to cabinetry to electrical systems before the home is shipped out to its site. That’s exactly what we were able to do with this custom Sunset Breezehouse that will be open to the public this Saturday in Santa Barbara. One of the really exciting things about building this home was that we we were also able to install its solar panels in the factory.

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Photo by John Swain

There are so many green features to love in the custom Sunset Breezehouse that is going to be open to the public this Saturday in Santa Barbara. One of our favorite is the cork flooring from BC Hardwood in the detached studio in back of the house. It was one of the elements the artist couple who owns the home chose for both its sustainable and practical nature. Cork is a wonderful renewable resource; it’s just the bark of the cork oak, which is cultivated in the form of large, carbon eating forests. Harvesting the cork from the oaks doesn’t harm the tree and the bark simply grows back after a time. So using it as flooring is a brilliant eco-friendly solution.

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Photo by John Swain

As we mentioned last week, an MKD home will be open to the public this Saturday, June 14 from 10am to 4pm thanks to the Built Green Santa Barbara Expo, Conference & Tour. We’re incredibly excited about the tour because this custom Sunset Breezehouse is just brimming with thoughtful, sustainable design elements. So this week, before the actual tour takes place, we wanted to highlight a few of our favorite green features in the home. Since it’s located in sunny Santa Barbara, some of the most important of those features are smart sun shading solutions. The home’s two operable trellises from LourveTec - one set over the back deck and the other over the entry to the detached studio - are perfect examples of smart sun shading.

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Photo by John Swain

Next Saturday, June 14 a custom Sunset Breezehouse will be open to the public in Santa Barbara, California. It’s a wonderful opportunity to experience firsthand what it’s like inside an MKD home. The open house is happening thanks to the Built Green Santa Barbara Expo, Conference, & Tour, which is organizing the tour to showcase green building in the area. This home is a perfect choice for the tour because the house itself is not the only green thing about it; the landscaping is also an excellent example of thoughtful, sustainable design.

I recently had a conversation with Margie Grace of Grace Design who masterminded the gorgeous, eco-friendly landscaping of this Santa Barbara abode. I love Margie’s work in general (her Zen Garden and Desert Pallet are two breathtaking examples of what she can do) but I especailly love what she did around this particular home. I wanted to find out more about the thinking behind her design and how she created such a beautiful, unique, and sustainable environment to surround this home…

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Photo by John Swain

We are very excited to announce that on June 14th of this year there will be an opportunity to experience an MKD home from within. Thanks to the Built Green Santa Barbara Expo, Conference & Tour and the absolutely fabulous family that lives in the home, this custom Sunset®Breezehouse™ will be open to the public beginning at 10 am on June 14th. It’s a truly beautiful home. Plus, the lovely artist couple we built it for has done an amazing job with the interiors and have truly made it their own. We hope you can make it to Santa Barbara that weekend to see it for yourself. I will also be giving a keynote address at the conference on the night of the 13th, the Friday before the tour, so if you can make it to that, as well, I would be delighted to see you there! Both the tour and my talk will be free of charge. To find out more visit the Built Green Santa Barbara website. Hope to see you then!