Rooftop Water Collection

The goal of the Florida House Learning Center is to introduce to Floridians techniques for building houses that are environmentally appropriate. To that end, co-founders W. Terry Osborne and June Engman are building a pair of model houses side-by-side for the Sarasota County Cooperative Extension Service. The first house, in the traditional cracker style, is now complete. In addition to its traditional style, it is compact (1600 ft2, with 800 ft2 of porches) and readily reproducible with off-the-shelf materials (see photo). The second house will exhibit a, more contemporary style and more advanced technologies, some of which are not yet on the market.

The cracker-style house features pocket doors that open up to 16’ for maximum cross-ventilation, a cupola over the kitchen, natural pest control instead of toxic soil treatments, and an engineered wood product called Timberstrand™ (see EBN