ArchiExpo features floating home in emagazine. An interesting article describing very different types of floating homes and individual needs. When designing a floating home, the architecture is very important, but not all is common sense. We always focus on view, priacy, combining in and outdoor areas, energy consumption - light, heating and use of varm water.
Thousands of Europeans are moving from a life by the sea to a life on the sea as floating homes are spreading like water lilies from the canals of Copenhagen to Portugal’s tranquil lakes. House boats have been around for long, but floating homes with the comforts, the stability and the space of a house on land have not.
The 100-Year Solution
Jesper Dirk Andersen is CEO of Dirkmarine, a Copenhagen and London-based firm offering houses as well as offices, restaurants and show rooms floating on a hull of concrete.
“I’m a ship engineer and used to be employed in a company building tunnels. One day I was gazing out of my office window in Copenhagen and saw families crawling in and out of tiny hatches on house boats with babies and strollers and I thought to myself that it ought to be possible to live on the sea in a more practical fashion,” he told ArchiExpo.
That was 15 years ago and today Dirkmarine provides the HUBB (HoUse Boat Bottom) solution, a customized and concrete hull designed to last 100 years without maintenance even in the icy, Nordic waters. The homes are generally two stories, 7 by 14 meters with a living space of 140 square meters, but Dirkmarine has delivered a 25 by 20 meters floating stage with 300 square meters both above and below deck.
“We produce all our concrete hulls ourselves. We follow and check every step very thoroughly and have throughout the 15 years had a faultless record,” said Andersen.
On top of being maintenance-free for a century, the concrete hull has a high stability and improves sea life; mussels and seaweed grows on the hull, which attracts fish and shrimp.
Floating home owners tend to want to both live in close contact with nature and without straining the environment. So demands for low impact high yield solutions are many. From Dirkmarine one of the offerings is drawing on the one element always at hand by a floating home.
”We use the river or sea water, run it through a heat pump made to withstand salt water, and generate the under floor heating and all the warm water needed on a floating home.”
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