Images: Lake Claire, Summerhill 'green houses' highlight MA! Tour

One’s clad in wood, one’s very red, but relatively speaking, both Atlanta properties are quite green.

Officials with Atlanta Design Festival’s 2024 MA! Architecture Tour, scheduled from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, point to two “green houses” in different parts of town as examples of forward-thinking, local architecture the festival has been spotlighting since 2007.

Tickets for the self-guided Atlanta tour are $45, and all participants must be at least 10 years old. This year, 16 contemporary dwellings and unique commercial properties are being featured.

Such as these smaller projects below—one within a virgin forest, the other on a tight lot walkable to a resurgent commercial district in a historic neighborhood.

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Project name: Solar RED-y House

Location: Summerhill

Architect: Alex Wu Architect

Interior design: Everly Design Co.

Address: 728 Terry St. (currently for sale at $750,000)

Previous zoning on this small intown lot didn’t allow for houses less than 20 feet wide—so the architect, Alex Wu, had to improvise. The result is a 1,732-square-foot, three-story dwelling that’s 45 feet long—but just 17 feet wide.

Beyond its “tight building envelope” and better ratings than are required for an Energy Star-certified home, the project counts these eco-conscious perks, according to Wu:

“Major electrical appliances were selected for their efficiency, including the heat pump water heater. Passive strategies include rooms having two operable windows on different walls where possible to allow cross breezes. Taking advantage of the home height, the operable skylight in conjunction with opening lower floor windows expels hot air out of the home passively on temperate days.”

Plus, there’s wiring and infrastructure for solar power and a cast-iron stove meant for preventing burst pipes in rare instances of freezes.

According to Wu, the house is 25 percent smaller than dwellings with similar features, which will slash its lifecycle (especially heating and cooling) costs. Its location near parks, Summerhill’s forthcoming Bus-Rapid Transit line, the Beltline’s Southside Trail, a major grocer in Publix, and a bounty of eats and retail cuts down on the need for car trips, the thinking goes.

Listen to Wu discuss the project in a 16-minute chat over here. And here’s a preview:

Photography by Daniel Stabler; courtesy of Atlanta Design Festival

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Project name: Forest House

Location: Lake Claire

Architect: Office of Design

Landscape architect: Day & Day

Address: 530 Lakeshore Drive

The so-called Forest House in Lake Claire was finished in 2022, situated near Ponce de Leon Avenue between two creeks at the edge of 39-acre Frazer Forest—one of just 14 fragments of precolonial forest remaining across all of Georgia, per project leaders. It’s situated under a dense tree canopy.

Clad in ash, the three-story A-frame home “is uniquely sited and designed to embrace the dynamism of this majestic ecosystem in all of its complexity and biological diversity,” per landscape designers Day & Day. “The project’s programmatic goals were to tread lightly on the ground plane while providing a platform from which to be immersed in nature’s spectacle, an increasingly rare, and purely genuine response to an overdeveloped world.”

Highlights include an outdoor living room in front, accessed via eight-inch bands of precast concrete pavers from Techo-bloc, while behind the home is a boardwalk and dining deck perched above the forest floor.

Yes, that’s controversial bamboo, but according to the landscape team, it serves a purpose.

“The original owners planted a grove of bamboo at the forest edge, presumably to ensure evergreen scenery from the bedrooms on the second and third floors,” reads a project description. “Although [bamboo is] aggressively invasive, we decided to keep [it] for the atmospheric qualities that it created. We looked at the bamboo as an opportunity to get inside and wind an elevated boardwalk deeper into the forest.”

The boardwalk leads to a clearing, with a fire feature dotted with boulders for seating and socializing.

Listen to a short interview with the landscape architects here. And below is a quick preview, with only exterior and landscape pics provided.

Photography by Heidi Harris; courtesy of Atlanta Design Festival