Stone House With Solar Panels

Brick and stone are excellent thermal mass materials. House designs that incorporate these materials are great at absorbing heat from the sun, and holding onto it throughout cold winter nights. In the summer, the stone and brick absorbs coolness from the night time air, and slowly releases that throughout the day so that little to no electrical cooling is needed in the home.

This house design also shows how facing big windows and doors to the south–in the Northern Hemisphere–can help take advantage of natural heating and cooling techniques too. In the winter the sun is at a much lower angle, and having many windows for it to shine through during the day helps naturally heat your home. In the summer the sun is much higher in the sky, so those small overhangs you see in this picture help shade the windows and doors, thus keeping the sun from overheating the house on hot days.

Houses that are designed to be energy efficient and use passive solar heating and cooling techniques get much better results when using solar panels to generate electricity, because the house design itself helps dramatically reduce the average amounts of electricity needed for powering the home.

Solar house image © Pics1 | Dreamstime.com

The house design is a square or box shape, with shingled siding painted a peach color. There are four symmetrical square windows on the front: Two on the bottom floor and two on the top. There’s also a tiny diamond shaped window in the center of the second floor windows, above the small porch roof.

The front porch area is quite small so it might be more of an entryway than a porch. It is covered by a small roof though, which is held up by two columns. A span of concrete steps lead up to the doorway with a metal railing in the middle. The wheelchair ramp comes up to the door from the right side in this picture.

This house has some nice green trees surrounding it and a simple, neatly trimmed grass yard.

These are some of my older house design pictures. This set features a few different adobe style house designs. Most of these adobe houses are small, and they tend to be very energy efficient because adobe is an excellent thermal mass material. That means it slowly collects heat throughout the day, and releases that heat slowly through the night. So during the better part of a warm day the adobe house is cool inside, and during the colder parts of night time the house is comfortably warm.

This small light colored Adobe house is nestled into a simple grass yard with a couple of trees.

This is a closer view of the front window on that same house.

This appears to be a mission style Adobe house design.

The first picture at the top of this article is of a pretty unusual looking house design, and I’m not entirely sure it’s actually made of Adobe. It might be block or brick instead.

This is one of my favorite house designs. It’s a gorgeous cottage style design, which mixes white stone and red brick. There’s a matching white stone chimney, and a matching white stone mailbox on the curb too. The yard is landscaped nicely with lush green grass, and there are flowers and bushes up close to the house for accent.

Overall this house design is quite beautiful and unique.

This first picture shows a much closer, detailed look at the front of this cottage style brick and stone house design.

And here you can see even more detail in the design around the arched windows.

Here’s another view of this gorgeous house design which shows most of the front

And another view, this time from further back on the street so you can see the matching mailbox

©2006, Kathy Burns-Millyard

If you’ve been looking for house plans and design ideas that include a porch, you’ll love this picture. The new red brick house has a porch spanning the entire front… and it’s beautiful. The porch is supported by white columns, and all the trim on the windows and door match the columns.

To take this design further of course, the porch has been outfitted with beautiful matching white furniture. There are rocking chairs placed in pairs with white flower pots between them. And there’s even a brick flower bed running the full length in front of the porch. You can see the new flower blooms in that flower bed, as well as the lush green lawn and water sprinklers in action. So in addition to getting house design ideas from this picture, you might also be inspired by the landscaping ideas too.

©2006, Kathy Burns-Millyard