Hale Ke Alaula is intended to be a house and garden all mixed together. Downstairs the garden spills in under the house. Upstairs, the house opens out to the deck, the garden, and the breezes.
Downstairs is concrete and steel construction, open spaces designed to withstand tsunamis and provide lots of room for lots of activities.
The house upstairs is all bamboo with drywall interior walls, board & batten exterior walls, and the roof is aluminum.
The steel structure downstairs extends up into the house above but it is well integrated such that you don’t notice it. All of the bamboo is completely structural, too, don’t get the wrong idea; but the addition of steel allows the house to be built like a big tent with long, open sides that could not be done with bamboo alone. Thus the big open ceiling can span above the single really big room and both bedrooms and the walls can be double doors which all open wide so there is no need for air conditioning.
The board and batten exterior siding is actually Hardy Board, a composite of wood and concrete that is both sustainably Green and fireproof.
The house provides all of its own electricity and stores a thousand gallons of water from the roof for watering the garden.
