Your Natural Home: The Complete Sourcebook and Design Manual for Creating a Healthy, Beautiful, and Environmentally Sensitive House

Much More Than a Product Directory

Janet Marinelli and Paul Bierman-Lytle. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1995. 272 pages. Hardcover $45; paperback $21.95.

Brand new from one of the pioneers in low-toxic, environmental architecture and one of the field’s most eloquent writers,

Your Natural Home is a superb resource for building professionals and homeowners alike. The first third of the book demonstrates what’s wrong with the way we build houses and how a prospective home owner can go about doing better. This section is focused around five different case studies—projects that Bierman-Lytle designed and built. Included with the case studies are very useful checklists on such topics as

Home building on a budget; Choosing a site; Ten steps toward an environmentally friendly apartment; and

The next generation of sewage treatment. These checklists are well balanced and greatly broaden the applicability of the information—especially discussions relating to budget constraints and setting priorities, because the projects chosen tend to be high-end.

The final two-thirds of the book—

A compendium of environmental home building, decorating, and maintenance products—will prove most useful for

EBN readers. Despite the title, this part of the book is far more than a product listing. The authors include useful background information for each product category along with listings. With concrete, for example, history of the material is presented, followed by a discussion of environmental impacts resulting from concrete production and use, and finally a discussion of environmental concrete products and alternatives (for example, autoclaved cellular concrete, Faswall™, Syndecrete™, wood-cement composite products, adobe, and rammed earth). Company names, addresses, and phone numbers are provided.

In the section on wood, the book includes both woods to look for and woods of concern—for both tropical and temperate species. Log home construction is discouraged, while engineered wood products are covered in depth. Both producers and suppliers of domestic woods from certified forestry operations are listed.

Products are covered in 37 different categories, which are grouped under the headings

structure, life-support systems, interior surfaces, furnishings, appliances & fixtures, children’s products, and

home maintenance products. In all, some 2,000 products are listed, making this one of the most complete listings of green building products ever compiled. We found a few inaccuracies, but the listings are remarkably comprehensive.

If we find fault with

Your Natural Home, it is that the book does not address very well the broader issues of land-use planning, automobile dependency, and responsible scaling of buildings. Several of the examples shown, while gorgeous houses, are very large and located in remote wilderness areas. Indeed, the final case study presented, “A twenty-first-century home,” is nestled into a high-desert plateau overlooking Idaho’s Big Wood River and is reached by a dirt road snaking through sagebrush scrub. While the home’s size is not listed, it looks huge from the plans, and although impressive systems are used for water recycling, indoor gardening, and photovoltaic power generation, one still has to question the magnitude and location of the house.

In the authors’ defense, the first projects to make use of leading-edge building systems and technologies tend to be built for wealthy clients. These are the proving grounds for ideas such as John Todd’s Living Technology wastewater treatment system. Out of these pioneering uses will emerge (we hope) smaller, more affordable systems that can be tailored to mainstream building. We heartily recommend this book.