Friends entertained us at recently, and I basked at the table with a winter sun at my back. Our hosts are conscientious environmentalists, and after I got home I realized that the reason my place at the table was so comfortable is that the house has an ideal solar orientation. The building is set in a sun trap that catches winter light through the glass doors of the dining area. A few feet away, the kitchen window faces a back yard that looks like a giant outdoor living room.
The house is set in an early post-war suburb and was probably marketed to a young couple whose children were entering school. Suburban tract housing came late to Seattle. The most prominent developer was a man named Balch. Mr. Balch started by building small groups of houses in many of Seattle’s distinctive neighborhoods. These places resembled the classic saltbox house of Levittown fame.
Balch Two was a more sophisticated version of the salt box, and then he began to build ranch-style places with part-brick facades. It is rare to find a Balch house that is sited badly.
The small mid-century tract houses of this region are designed for a woman who stayed at home with the kids, had to iron, and did all her own cooking. She could very well have been the daughter of a woman who employed a day worker and the granddaughter of a woman who had live-in help.
These small, one-story houses were consciously designed in reaction to Victorian architecture: maintenance is as easy and cheap as the times permitted. Functioning like free-standing condos, the houses are built on cement slabs out of genuine materials. The wood in them was milled out of centuries-old trees cut from virgin rain forest, and the walls are of fire-retardant plaster.
My friends hail from the Midwest, and the formidable winters of that region may not have left them aware that it takes very little to stay comfortable through the Northwest’s version of the cold months. Their new patio is set like a masonry carpet just outside glass doors on the south wall of the house. It would be a small matter to set a portable greenhouse over those doors and use it to heat the kitchen and dining areas. The greenhouse could be a temporary winter installation. Simple curtains laid over spring-loaded poles in the doorways would contain the solar gain and make using the furnace optional.
Prevailing social values in the neighborhood, and how much the neighbors can actually see in the back yard, will dictate what kind of structure would be suitable. A tour of digital garden and farm resources will turn up some affordable options, and a plastic structure would be easy to remove in spring. It would be surprising if a greenhouse did not pay for itself in a couple of years.
A while ago, an architect/handyman did some work on an apartment next door. He started by nailing a clean, white tarp to the side of the building and propped it up to make an elegant rain shelter over the patio-glass door entry area. Even this simple installation would generate solar gain and cast an elegant winter light into the central rooms of my friends’ house. It is conceivable that opening the upper sash of the kitchen window an inch or two would harvest a noticeable amount of solar heat from a tarp. One could slope the tarp down from its base on the wall and prop it a few inches in from either end to leave a couple of small flaps that would channel heat into the open window.
A local hardware chain carries white woven plastic tarps in quite a few sizes. This material transmits beautiful light, and winter rains would keep it fairly clean.
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More after the jump.
