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 Whether you live in Portland, Thailand, Swaziland or Scotland, there's a pole house that's right for you.
All our pole houses can be tailored to be climatically appropriate for your locale. Depending on the challenges posed by Mother Nature, the exterior walls of a pole house may be as simple as insect netting and canvas or as extraordinary as an argon gas filled triple insulated glazing system.
Pole house construction virtually eliminates the need for expensive terrain-altering site work, excavations and retaining walls. Difficult terrain is generally not a problem, making otherwise undesirable hillside, sloped, marshy, rocky, sandy or flood prone sites suddenly affordable to build upon.
Indigenous, recyclable and readily renewable materials are preferred depending on quality and local availability. Craftspeople you choose within the local community can carry out the entire construction assembly process.
Pole house structures use less material than conventional building methods and are faster to erect, thus more cost effective. Our design is one of the lowest home costs per square foot in the construction industry as well as one of the most energy efficient for your regional climate.
We can tailor energy efficient systems such as operable natural ventilation in floors, walls, ceilings and roofs to match individual pole house site micro-climates.
Systems which may be implemented, as deemed appropriate for your locale:
- Wind energy
- Solar photovoltaic
- Solar hot water systems
- Passive solar space heating and cooling
- Tankless hot water
- Rain water collection
- Gray water reclamation
- Ultra low flush and composting toilets
Climatically appropriate and durable, a pole house is resource efficient, comfortable to live in and affordable to build. Creative use of materials promotes the greatest building performance at minimal maintenance and operating costs.
In our pole houses, large diameter vertical wood poles firmly bolted atop reinforced concrete footings carry the load of the floor and roof. This strong flexible skeletal structure permits all interior and exterior walls to be non-load bearing.
Girder beams, floor joists and tension ring beams are through bolted directly into the notched vertical wood poles to create a unique structural grid. Cantilevered wood beams allow for unlimited design flexibility.
We design and engineer our pole houses on a modular grid system which lends itself beautifully to the efficiencies of Post and Beam and Timber Frame construction techniques which we utilize.
Due to the notched and through bolted interlocking system, exposed structural elements move together as a unit and are better able to resist the adverse effects of hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes and flooding.
The skeletal structural system utilizes the economies, efficiencies and characteristics of wood beam construction by maximizing spacing and cantilevering of members. This makes greater spans possible, since loading the cantilevering section of the beams counteracts loading on the center spans.
Pole houses can be readily adapted to the changing dynamics of your family. Since all walls of a pole house are completely non-load bearing, you can change room configurations at will, at any time, with ease.
Every effort is made to design and engineer our pole houses to surpass local, regional and national building codes in effect, including the International Residential Codes (IRC).
Some of our clients want to design their own pole house. We have a unique and innovative approach to simplify the entire pole house designing process. Explore our plans and choose the platform size which best suits your needs. We can then provide you with erasable vellum plans for that platform, allowing you or your Architect to then overlay your desired floor plan design. Have fun exploring the unlimited possibilities of floor plans and layouts! Choose the "Reproducible Vellum Plans" option when ordering.
By exploring our website, you may have already learned that all the walls of a pole house are non-load bearing, be they interior walls or exterior walls. Since the skeletal structure of a pole house is independent of wall placement, attention to the science of structural engineering loading requirements is eliminated. You are free to explore the creative spatial possibilities without being concerned with the intricacies of the laws of physics.
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