night

The courtyard (left) and the front of the house (below) at night. The transparency of the windows and doors (created by the lighting in the courtyard - including the hanging Foscarini Uto lamps - and in the interior) emphasizes the continuity of the roof structure between the inside and outside. Our next step is to furnish the courtyard, so we can take better advantage of the low humidity and moderate evening temperature of the dry season.

LED lighting

One of the hardest pieces of the sustainability puzzle for us has been selecting good lighting for the house.  Compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs are so common that it's easy to compare their visual quality and energy efficiency, but light-emitting diode (LED) lighting is still so novel that it's hard to find live displays to help us evaluate the different lighting options. It's particularly difficult to find lighting strips (as opposed to individual bulbs) installed as samples. So while everyone knows what a standard 60 watt incandescent bulb looks like, it's very hard to imagine how an 11 watt LED bulb performs, let alone a 5W/ft LED strip light.

lust for lights

We've been doing a lot of shopping for light fixtures over the last two days, with a series of unsuccessful hunts for simple cord sets (literally a cord and socket with which to make a pendant lamp) leading to interesting discoveries of LED exterior lights and other things we'd had trouble finding. One of today's trips netted four lights for our bathroom vanities, sort of. We found a 20" long LED fixture by George Kovacs (left) that will be perfect in three of the bathrooms. However, the factory has a backlog of 6,000 orders to fill before we'll get our lights (we were promised mid-June) which we read as an exciting indication that energy-efficient lighting has come of age as a first choice for homeowners. This is a very good sign, not least because it suggests the economy is rebounding, but especially because companies are making, and customers are choosing, energy-efficient options. We found a similar dilemma with dual-flush toilets. A very promising sign indeed.

further progress

With the last exterior panels installed at the living and dining rooms, we have a stronger sense of the spatial qualities of that part of the house. We're particularly heartened by the amount of natural light that comes through the door openings (to the courtyard) and the windows (toward the park), and by the soft reflections of light off the concrete floor and galvanized roof decking and ductwork.

lighting

Consumer Reports has a great article on light bulbs, which includes some of the most extensive testing yet of light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs, a few weeks after a good comparative essay on bulbs in the New York Times. The good news is that commercially available LED bulbs are both reliably durable and pleasant to the eye. We suspect that, like compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs), LEDs are going to quickly become popular with consumers (except for a small segment of tin-foil hat types who associate LEDs with a government plot to take away their guns, bibles and/or medications), and that their price will drop markedly. We are planning to use LED replacement bulbs in conventional track lighting fixtures in the kitchen, and living and dining rooms. We still haven't settled on a strategy for lighting the dining table, but friend of tin box Cathy Bell reminds us of these compelling beauties from Plumen.