I am thinking about creating a new kind of house for my family. I am really in the brain storming phase, and I wanted your input and opinions.
First of all, it will be a steele frame building. None of this pretending we live in a mansion or that our house is a remnant of the colonial period. There will be chicken wire layed parrallel to the outside structure completely covering the building. Ivy will be planted in the chicken wire, and will be allowed to grow and cover the entire structure. The ivy will keep direct sunlight from making the building too hot in the summer, and will help insulate it in the winter.
Now the inside…There will be a polished, heated concrete floor. But the thing that will make this house really neat is the walls. They will each be independantly mounted on rubber wheels. You can reconfigure the house very easily. Kid goes to college? Remove the walls of his room and you can reconfigure your living space to take advantage of the space your kids used to need. He comes home after graduation? Reorganize the space again.
Having a party? Open up the spaceby rolling back a few walls and create a ballroom.
Having company for a few days? Create for them their own space.
Of course there will have to be a few fixtures and permanant walls for the kitchen and the bathrooms.
The walls, by the way, are painted metal. You can very easily take the metal panels down and repaint them outside without having to worry about drop clothes or getting paint on the floor. Also, you can easily change your decor because everything sticks to the walls with magnets.
You would use rugs to make the floor more warm and welcoming.
This would not appeal to someone who has a bunch of junk and clutter. (but I think we have too much of it anyway) This will appeal to the minimalist. Push back the walls, roll your furniture aside and clean your whole house with a 5 foot wide mop/broom. You will have much less dust and those allergic to dust mites will be thankful for that!
So what are your thoughts? Has anything like this been done? What are the pros and cons?
with no permanent walls, what holds up these heavy concrete floors? Seems like at the very least you’ll need some beams for support.
rolling metal walls will provide next to no sound barrier. Everything will be very loud, since the metal will not muffle any of the sound. Forget about privacy - a TV or radio or conversation will be heard everywhere in the house.
I can’t imagine how I’d make metal walls feel homey and comfortable. I’d feel like I was living in a refrigerator.
If you wanted to a second story it would be easy enough to do it will steel trusses, the second floor would not be concrete. But i had envisioned this as all one floor.
The walls would be essentially 2 sheets of metal fixed parrallel about 4 inches apart. Insulation would be sprayed in between the layers. This would dampen the noise and help regulate temperature. You could also have decorative rubber moulding that you would remove when you moved the walls and reattach when they are inplace. This would seal the gap between the top of the wall and the ceiling.
I agree with Athena, I think it would be very noisy, since the moveable walls would necessitate a gap between the ceiling/floor and the moveable wall.
What might work better would be something more like the moveable walls that hotels use in banquet rooms - you could have a grid of slots in the ceiling/floor which the wall partitions snap in/out of. It would limit your creativity as far as the configuration of the rooms, but give you more flexibility than permanent walls.
Seriously though, my major concern is about the look of it. I know you will have rugs and soft-colored paint, but wont it still look very cold and uninviting with all that metal and concrete?
I went to high school in a building that was designed with this philosophy in mind. The exterior of the place looked like a warehouse, and really, the interior didn’t look much different from one, either. The idea, when the place was built, in 1971, was “reconfigurable” classrooms, but by the time I got there in '83, they’d completely given up on that idea. It was too much of a hassle, and it wasn’t difficult to knock the walls out of alignment.
The rooms were also quite noisy, because the walls didn’t absorb sound. You also can have problems with radio reception.
Putting the outlets in the floor isn’t such a good idea, either. They tend to collect crap that falls on the floor and can become trip hazards if you’re not paying attention (even if they’re nearly flush with the floor).
I’d also imagine that you’d have problems with getting the housing inspector to approve such a design.
Finally, unless you’re fairly innovative in your design, you’re going to have problems with keeping the place cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
I think it would be possible to cover the walls with fabric. That would absorb some sound. And, if the rubber baseboard/molding would work, that would certainly help.
Autolycus, we have a polished concrete floor and I think it’s quite appealing.
Yeah, we had those, and you’d be surprised at how easy it was to trip over one.
IIRC, building codes prohibit gaps at the bottoms of interior walls, as if there’s a fire, it can travel from one room to another via those gaps. And while a steel building won’t burn, the contents surely will.
Are the outside walls moveable? Do you want to build a Japanese house with metal shoji, basically?
If the outside walls are not moveable, I don’t know why you need the chicken wire. Won’t ivy happily grow on whatever you use for the exterior? My childhood home had extensive ivy growing on its stone exterior.
If you don’t have fixed outside walls, insulation will be a problem. Either you would have to do some serious “battening down of the hatches” in the fall, make it a summer home, build in a warm climate, or put up with the cold. The latter is the traditional Japanese solution.
Moveable inside walls could have outlets on them, if they then plugged into the ceiling. Whether that would meet fire codes is another matter.
I believe that its been done. Non traditional buildings don’t tend to hold their resale value, if you need to sell it, you may have a very difficult time trying to find a buyer. Anything moveable tends to create more maintenance and wear issues that will need to be dealt with. You’ll find yourself restricted to things like plumbing on the outside walls - probably major appliances as well. I personally don’t find concrete and metal to be welcoming - and have found fabric on walls to be a pain to keep clean, but its your home. If you aren’t an architect, hire a good one, and make sure you have a really good builder as well - there are probably going to be strange issues with this sort of design that you want a professional to analyze.
But as I understand your idea, its basically a stand alone “open loft” idea. Which is very popular on smaller scales (one or two people). At one time I knew someone who lived in a large loft with the fly curtain type dividers you get in a theatre. It would drive me crazy to share such a space - I require doors and real walls and privacy.
Steel is also a very poor insulator. Even if you have insulation beween the outer and inner panels, anywhere there is steel connecting that inner and outer wall is a path for hot/cold.
If you want to use deciduous vegetation to take advantage of shading in the summer and direct sunlight in the winter you could get the same effect by planting deciduous trees and bushes along the east-south-west facades of the house.
Open floor plans have been done before but the cons (most of them listed here) usually outweigh the pros. How often is someone really going to want to change the living space? Where do you store the wall segments if your not using them? HVAC and plumbing limited to outer walls which now make them subject to the exterior wall temperatures.
I’ve seen large commercial and industrial spaces designed this way and everytime they make a change in the space it somehow ends up being a lot more work that it would appear to be.
