Facts

Builder: Hannigan Homes, Inc.
Architect: WCI Architecture & Land Planning, Inc.
Interior Designer: Saxon-Clark
Landscape Architect: Redmon Design Company
Energy Efficiency: IBACOS Consortium

Location: 11525 Center Lake Drive, Orlando, FL 32800

Area under roof – 10,023 sq. ft. / Area of a/c space – 7,367 sq. ft.

Each year, the National Association of Home Builders builds a house at the site of its International Builders’ Show^® convention to showcase “state-of-the-art” home-building techniques and materials.

NAHB’s TNAH 2006 showcase house is located in southwest Orange County on the shores of Windermere's Lake Burden in the subdivision that is tentatively named South Lake Burden, minutes from the Convention Center.

"I'm as excited as I can be about the whole project," builder Hannigan says. "We are trying to achieve a 'wow' factor everywhere you go in the house." With that wow factor in mind, architects John Orgren and Flavio Coronel of WCI Communities Inc. designed for the site a long, shallow, two-story house that offers a lake view from nearly every room. The middle section of the 9,500-square-foot house under roof (7,100 sq. ft A/C) will be only one-room deep.

The 2006 New American Home^® is a study in contrasts to previous show homes and will be much more of an extrovert -- spreading itself the length of the lot to take in the full expanse of lakefront. "It will be all wide and open and take advantage of the main amenity, which is going to be the lake," and an "endless pool," with edges that appear to melt into the lake will accentuate that view,. There are plenty of outside spaces planned for the home, including loggias and two fireplaces. And the outside spaces are designed to flow into interior spaces when walls of doors slide into hidden pockets.

Nobody can seem to come up with one word to describe the home's style, it is a mix of styles, that were found in early Florida, particularly in the St. Augustine area. The home’s exterior design has a bit of a Caribbean flavor incorporating the use of stucco, associated with Spanish-style architecture, and coupled with vernacular lap siding. The architects used a variety of devices to break up the home's wide facade, including a tower room, which bumps out in the front and the loggias in the back.

Though the design is for the self-centered buyer, The New American Home^® was built to introduce this new community to the “green” philosophy making the home friendly to the environment. The home’s plans uses, as many Earth-friendly materials as possible and will be, as green as we can possibly make it," Hannigan says. The shallow depth of the house makes it ideal for cross ventilation if the air conditioning is off, and the deep overhangs and loggias help keep out the direct sun. In fact, making sure that the house is Earth-friendly was one reason architects from WCI, which has developed a number of green communities, were chosen to design the home. The show home, which is energy star rated through the U.S. Department of Energy program “Building America”, is also set to become the first certified "green" home built through the New American Home program since it began in 1984. The certification verifies that the house uses environmentally sensitive materials and principles in its construction and is also energy-efficient.

The home is designed to appeal to a young retiree or someone near retirement who wants a home with amenities rather than bedrooms. The house will have a media room, a game room and a lakefront spa-room featuring practically every high-tech water feature Kohler offers, as well as a massage table. "It's a baby-boomer, all-about-me house," Hannigan says, there are so many nice things in the right places and of course, comes equipped with every amenity.

The house is also designed with an elevator to be almost 100 percent wheelchair accessible, so the mythical baby-boomer retiree buyer, would be able to stay in the house, even if someday he is disabled and needs a wheelchair to get around. The New American Home^® '06's master suite, which comes with a morning kitchen and laundry is so complete that the occupants could easily exist without ever entering the home's main area.

The home's owner could have company visiting in the downstairs guest suite on the other side of the house and, theoretically, never cross paths.

And then there are the four upstairs bedrooms, plus bonus space for another as well.

The first-floor home-office area, which features a second-floor library that wraps around its perimeter, has a separate entrance to the front so someone could conduct business without visitors going through the main home.

Green features embodied in this plan include abundant natural light and ventilation, thickened insulated exterior walls to mediate temperature differentials, and welcoming outdoor living spaces to foster a close relationship with the natural world. Other features that foster sustainable construction are listed below.

• Universally accessible design to minimize future renovations
• Insulated concrete form walls
• Sprayed Icynene expanding foam roof insulation
• Sustainable interior doors and trim
• High efficiency "Storm Force" doors and windows
• High SEER air conditioning system
• Central dehumidification
• HEPA filtration for clean indoor air
• Tankless "instant" hot water heater
• Integrated pest management
• Integrated towel bars/grab bars in bathrooms
• Water efficient landscape species and design
• Rainwater harvesting from roof gutter system
• Garden mulch made from recycled construction materials

The keynote throughout the plan is clarity and simplicity, to facilitate an active, healthy, environmentally, engaged life.

Facts Sheet
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