Holistic or integrated home design is the art and science of creating homes which take full advantage of the natural resources available – notably light and heat – while providing a comfortable, pleasant living environment. Like all things, it has its advantages and disadvantages.
One of the biggest drawbacks of holistic home design is the size of the required planning team. On top of the home owner, an architect and a construction professional needed for traditional design, holistic design often needs a variety of green energy specialists, heating and cooling professionals and probably several installers for the specialized systems.
With such a big team, the cost overheads at the start of the project can be daunting. The only way around that expense is to do the learning and work with friends and family on the project, in which case you are exchanging your time for the money you would invest – and it's still expensive.
The other big drawback is that you will be building something unique. This means that you cannot rely on a traditional architect or builder's knowledge to answer all your questions. You will have to seek out those professionals who have enough experience in building holistic homes that they can provide sensible advice. This may mean going a lot farther afield than you would if you were just building a standard house.
However, those professionals are out there and available. Holistic home design has been around for thousands of years and modern holistic design has been active since the 1960s, so there is plenty of good, reliable information and experience available.
If you are retrofitting your home with passive systems, you will run into the disadvantage of all the disruption and also the difficulty of working out exactly which options are available to you, given your current location, home design and installed systems. This can require professional input which adds an extra cost on top.
The advantages of a house built to holistic or integrated home design standards are many, ranging from the purely financial to the eco-friendly. From a purely material point of view, a holistic home design will significantly reduce your annual heating bills. It will also reduce your annual lighting bills. The investment will easily pay for itself within its lifetime through these reductions and through the additional value it brings to your home.
These points cannot be stressed enough, because the primary goal of sustainable living is to remove your reliance on non-renewable fossil fuels. These fuels rise in price every year, so the amount you save will rise exponentially over time, as will the value the passive system adds to your home. If the financial advantages are all that interest you, that fact alone is a clincher!
If aesthetics are your main concern, you need not worry. The majority of passive systems are beautiful and give a home not only a more modern aspect but improve the lighting inside and offer better views than their active counterparts. Homes built from scratch to holistic design standards are more often works of art as well