The Garden Atriums: Section and Elevation

"Super insulation" (two feet in the roof, one foot in outside walls)
Skylight over entire central garden
Glass walls between rooms and central garden
Privacy fences for personal bedroom patios
Six exterior wall veneer options (stone, or brick)
Fully operable shutters (for night insulation, security, storm protection)

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the Garden Atriums is the elegance and overall aesthetic impact of their design. Fitting comfortably with other houses in the neighborhood, each house incorporates a unique blend of materials into an enduring, self-sustaining whole. The Garden Atriums offer 5 different palettes of professionally blended materials that can be fully customized. The central skylight is visually impressive, while serving as an ideal natural source of both warmth and illumination for the house and garden.

No question, the super-insulation effort is a wise investment, for reducing both heating and cooling loads. The 35’ x 35’ skylight covering the original Garden Atrium is both more costly and less efficient than in the later homes. The QuFu2 skylight only faces southward, and is 90º to the winter sun, for maximum insolation. In the first Garden Atrium, back-up heating comes on from around 2 am to 7:30 am, when the temperature falls below 34º. The QuFu2's back-up heating never comes on.

Shades cover the inside of the skylight during summer months. They soften the daylight in the Atrium. And they reduce the maximum cooling load to under 2 tons!