While the facade is dark and has no windows facing the street, the interior of the house is dominated by light spruce and light. The large dining and living room on the first floor is oriented to the south side, between the living area and outbuilding with garage, a terrace with a view of the greenery invites you to linger. Upstairs are bedrooms and children’s rooms. The spacious play hall is shared. 130 square meters of living space are available for the family of four.
Super fast and very cheap
More than 90 percent of the house is built from renewable or recycled raw materials. The components were prefabricated to measure and then only assembled on site. In late summer 2016, it took just one week for the solid wooden walls to be erected. After three months, the house was ready for occupancy - and didn’t even cost very much.
But how could the house be so inexpensive? “The most extraordinary thing is probably that we didn’t build a basement,” Kai Beck explains on the phone, and you can literally hear him smiling. The fact that no large excavation was necessary saved some costs. The Beck family has enough space for bicycles and skis in an adjoining room of the garage.
In addition, there are the advantages of wood as a building material: Unlike a house made of stone, no interior plastering is necessary. There is also no need for slot work for sockets, light switches, etc. And because everything is built quickly, there is not much expensive labor.
Low power consumption
The house draws its energy primarily from the photovoltaic system on the roof. The electricity from the PV system drives an air-source heat pump. This heats the underfloor heating and heats the water. The family consumes about 3,000 kilowatt hours per year, including the heat pump. And there is even a little electricity left over to feed into the grid. How does that work? “The building envelope is simply very good,” Beck explains. For example, he says, the floor slab on recycled foam glass ballast has a very good insulation value, as do the walls.
Numerous prizes won
The sustainable home that Kai Beck planned together with his architect colleague Sebastian Heinemeyer has already won numerous awards. Since it was planned as an efficiency house, it received subsidies from the KfW Bank. Incidentally, it was not clear to the Beck family from the outset that it would be a wooden house. “We were open-minded about it.” In the end, the favorable construction costs tipped the scales.
Walls like a Japanese temple
Shou Sugi Ban is the name of the method used in Japan to permanently preserve wood by selective charring. The wood for the facade is charred, quenched, cleaned and treated with a natural oil. This creates a surface that appears black and silvery or more purple, depending on the weather. “This is basically dead wood in which neither animals nor algae can settle,” explains Beck, who learned about the method during a semester abroad. Centuries-old Japanese temples are built using this traditional technique - and now also a residential building in Stuttgart.
Solar systems, heat pumps and energy efficiency
Are you also planning a solar system (opens in a new tab) on your building? Are you also thinking about a heat pump (opens in a new tab)? Do you also want to use ecological, certified building materials (opens in a new tab)? The city of Stuttgart supports these measures and promotes contemporary and sustainable buildings (opens in a new tab).
