Studio APXE’s design is for a small residential estate of 3 net zero energy houses based on the passivhaus standard in Belomorski district, Plovdiv. Each of the buildings is a detached single family house.
Each house is situated in a way that it settles optimal space for a south yard, furthermore all residential premises are south-oriented and with a view to the yard. The unification of the unheated premises and open-air activities (BBQ, summer kitchen) in a single-stored volume contributes to the visual separation of each yard from the other. In this way, the houses provide the necessary tranquility for each household. The residential part of the building is a two-stored volume, which ends with a double-pitched roof with a photovoltaic system installed on its south slope.
The project aims reaching net zero energy consumption for the whole housing estate and for each separate house as well. In order to reach the net zero energy consumption of a house on an annual basis, the overall energy demand of the house, including energy for heating, cooling, auxiliary and household electricity, should equal the energy conservation by solar electricity. In our case, we minimized the overall energy demand by meeting the passivhaus requirements and we optimized the auxiliary and household electricity. By the same time, we designed a photovoltaic system, which generates and conserves as much energy as the overall energy demand (specific primary energy demand) on an annual basis.
The catchy part of each house’s design is the green tree over the main entrance, which crown breaks the roof’s plain and rises above it. The color in the horizontal cladding of the ground floor and the coloring of the glass railings differ each house from the other.
The ground floor of the house consists of lobby, living room, kitchen with dining room, toilet. The staircase leads to the first floor, which is consists of master-bedroom with a separate bathroom and closet, two children’s bedrooms with shared bathroom and closet. There is laundry room on the same floor and technical room on the under-roof level.
The energy demand results for each house reached by designing and calculating in PHPP, are the following:
- Specific space heat demand: 12 kWh/m2 annually;
- Primary energy demand: 87 kWh/m2 annually;
- Energy conservation by solar electricity: 29 kWh/m2 annually.
Sq. Area: 831
Designer: Studio APXE
Design Team: arch. Georgi Nikolov, arch. B. Takov, arch. S. Draganova
Investor: Ecoenergy 2005 Ltd.