Modern natural home design includes the body of design principles from the 20th century and merges streamlining, clean concepts from the industrial revolution with contemporary design, technology, and materials.  Though modern natural may not incorporate passive or active solar design, its’ forms are of open indoor/outdoor living, with no formal spaces and uses the latest in energy saving technologies. The home plan is integrated into the site itself, with more natural settings or with no grass yards and uses just a minimum of natural material types such as high performance glass, concrete, steel, stone, and wood for warmth. Modern natural is common in remodeling, and urban areas where there are tight sites or structures in existence. City roof top gardens are a common retrofit.

The word USoniA was coined in the early 1900s by American writer James Duff Law referring to the identity of the United States of America.  The father and master of Organic design, Frank Lloyd Wright chose the acronym to describe his revolutionary tiny organic home plans that were inspired by the touch times of the great depression of the 1930s. 

Today, just as valid in our financially challenged times, the tiny Terra Homage™ natural house plan concept applies to any who seek independence in life from mortgages, seek the gratification of constructing their own artistic studio home, and wish to harmonize with nature. Our homes are designed and built like a small well constructed yacht. Conditioned areas are typically less than 1000 feet squared, yet live big, with shared areas, and indoor-outdoor living. Designed to be built by the owner, the homes are solar tempered, with high thermal mass, and can be off grid and made with recycled and reclaimed materials or found locally.

Find your own beautiful building site place in nature. When you do, we are here with an Artistic Usonian home plan design. Together we’ll personalize a plan or design anew. Here you may begin a fresh life of inspiration in an inspiring Terra Homage™ Organic Home Plan.

Terra Homage™ solar home design is characterized by organic principles employing and harnessing the home site’s specific energies of the sun. All solar home plan designs are “sun tempered” to control and manage the solar radiant heat-light spectrum for current or passive use in the structure to the benefit of the people.  House plans shall incorporate these technologies as an esthetically pleasing integrated dimension of the character of the whole. Many ancient peoples understood the earth, and sun in ways modern man has ignored.  We now may combine the science of the Anasazi with today’s science to once again create designs with beauty growing form and function.

All Terra Homage™ collection designs use the elements of solar design as a core of the design principles. Latitude, longitude, micro-climates, are all studied which, together evolve to form the massing shapes, overhangs, glass areas, and thermal mass storage of the passive solar home design.  Active solar-powered systems may then be incorporated in to the plan design as a supplement to balance the temperature delta T of the conditioned areas within. Examples of active solar are photovoltaics (PVs) , and hydronic water heating for domestic use and radiant heated floors which use pumps.  Any home may be partially or completely off grid.  Thus uplifting the independence of the individuals from interdependence of the power systems.  In so doing the floor plan becomes a “Natural Machine” and relies solely on nature for power and warmth.

Where form does not follow function, but are one in the same, Terra Homage™ design principles live.

Modern organic home design owes it’s origins to master Frank Lloyd Wright. The spirit of organic design lies in the inherent nature of the site, materials, the persons, and the beauty of the reality of the space within. Always balancing nature with technology advancements, Mr. Wrights’ master works were always evolving in outward appearance and character, yet born of the same philosophy.

Terra Homage™ Organic design grows from the seeds of the master works in spirit, allowing the evolving home site to embrace modern human needs integrating the newest of technologies, and married symbiotically to the nature of the site. Designed using a grid of GPS satellite data and radii arcs, the organic designs employ arcs, and ramps more than the linier dimensioning and steps of conventional designs. Thus engineering merges with fractal, and Fibonacci sequences found in all the natural world. The arc and ramp is a much more natural elegant way of flowing movement.  The move away from post and beam and right angles and vertical steps allows for a beautiful advancement in esthetics and living. To all these underlying philosophies grows the continuation of Organic design from the soul. Then physically incorporates local natural and native materials, solar design, and leading edge technologies. It is thus so, healthier, timeless in natural and built beauty, and a conduit towards personal enlightened living as an individual being.

Terra Homage™ portfolio designs are the inspiration of specific places of beauty in the natural world of experiences.  In travels to national parks or any place of natural sublime awe, designer James Klippel draws sketches from a true physical place experienced. Using photos, and USGS maps, he then creates geomorphic organic home plans which grew as an extension of the wonders experienced in the natural world. In this manner, paying homage to the land, and the spirit of the creatures of the land, and to the people, who there together, co-exist.

Journey with us in creating your own Terra Homage™ Organic living home. Together, we’ll design and build amongst your place of inspiration in nature.

Terra Homage™ earth bermed and earth sheltered home plan designs seek to blend art, nature, the site, energy use, and the needs of the persons in a functional yet esthetically please whole.  There exists no finer manner to tie the human built environment to the nature of the land.  The Earth in turn, provides a buffer to the extremes in weather, while tying us to the natural landscape. The earth bermed designs may be embraced by soil on the North side of the home, (in the northern hemisphere), for protection, while the roof and south are open to the suns natural warmth to heat the home via radiation.  Earth sheltered home plans have completely blanketed northern walls and the roof buried in many feet of soil. The entire known history of human kind has examples of incorporating earth tempered designs in built structures.  Modern masters of Earth berming and earth sheltered design, Frank Lloyd Wright and Malcom Wells created homes of lasting beauty and function.

The evolution and future of earth sheltered home design is here for you now with Terra Homage™ design. Contact us today to begin your creative journey.

Home designs employing a living or green roof are known collectively as Garden Roof designs.  Sod and living roofs home plan designs have been an integral part of humans’ indigenous life since prehistory. Northern Europeans combined birch bark with a top turf layer of meadow grasses as insulation. Native Americans and settlers of the mid-west built with prairie sod.  Some were complete sod homes.

Terra Homage™ garden roof home plans integrate the latest in modern building materials, science, and technology combined with artisan craftsman and construct embracing living and natural native plant life into the home site plan. The master of the modern living roof homes, architect Malcom Wells is the “father” of garden roof earth sheltered homes design. Whereas an earth sheltered home may be constructed subgrade with a foot or more of soil above, garden roof plan designs are lighter in weight and are used as the “fifth plain of design”, a roof top terrace, captured areas for outdoor living space.  The green roof design attracts important pollinating insects, adds oxygen to our air, helps cool the micro-climate, adds thermal insulation, is safer in storms, and is esthetically much more pleasing. The green roof can also harbor beehives, goats, chickens, herb and vegetable gardens in a safer place from predators as well as storing rainwater in cisterns. We are now integrating “living walls plans” into the home site and garden plans.  These beautiful living topiary type sculptures are the next evolution in arbors and trellis historically used in home plan designs.

A Terra Homage™ garden roof home plan can be the next phase in your own personal evolution to a more inspiring and sustainable future.