How Green Building Meets Luxury Design
How Green Building Meets Luxury Design
Contributed by Matt Lee
Owner, Innovative Building Materials
Designing a luxury building on its own can be a significant challenge for certain architects, but designing a luxury building that is aesthetically pleasing as possible while remaining eco-friendly is another beast.
Luckily, there have been quite a few innovations in the field of luxury green construction lately that should make things a lot easier. If you’ve been tasked with creating a building that mixes both luxury and green, eco-friendly materials perfectly, here are a few ideas you can steal from us if you need them.
Green Kitchen Trends
Building your countertops from concrete, quartz, or other common materials can be an easy way to achieve that luxury look that’s so important to have with countertops, but it’s not even close to the most eco-friendly option you could choose. Instead, consider going with white countertops made from solid surface material.
Solid surface may not be a naturally occurring material, but it happens to be more eco-friendly than many others that are. There are a wide variety of different luxury styles to choose from with white countertops, and you can rest easy knowing they’re LEED accredited.
Ways to Use Natural Wood
Natural wood is known for its beauty and sustainability. If you can incorporate natural wood into your building you should be able to easily achieve your desired balance of green design and luxury.
These outdoor window trim ideas should help. Building the exterior frames of your windows and/or door with natural wood is one the simplest and most effective ways to make use of this material. You might also consider siding options including vertical wood siding and fiber cement siding styled to look exactly like natural wood.
Recycled Material
Permeable pavers made from recycled plastic are a sleek and discreet way to give your building a unique and eco-friendly look. Try creating your entire parking lot with permeable pavers or maybe just a driveway.
The aggregates available to fill them like gravel and crushed limestone will look incredibly stylish and the permeability, as well as the production methods used to make these pavers, are more environmentally-friendly than anything else you’ll find on the market.
Green Roof
Nothing says eco-friendly like a green roof filled to the brim with plants and vegetation. Not only is this one of the most effective ways to spice up your building’s look, it’s also a much more eco-friendly option than installing a traditional roof with asphalt shingles. Your roof will be protected and do its job just like normal, only you’ll have a beautiful, sprawling garden on top of your building instead of a boring, black roof.
GREEN BUILDINGS ARE EASIER THAN EVER TO CREATE
With all the recent innovations in green design, it’s not nearly as big of a challenge as it used to be to create a luxury building with a low carbon footprint. By experimenting with some of these options, you can get the best of both worlds for your new building and enjoy an eco-friendly and stylish design.
Matt Lee is the owner of the Innovative Building Materials blog and a content writer for the building materials industry. He is focused on helping fellow homeowners, contractors, and architects discover materials and methods of construction that save money, improve energy efficiency, and increase property value.