Your source of innovation in architecture & design
Architecture

Behind the Floating Home

Behind the Floating Home
Netherlands, Amsterdam, IJmeer. House of Kees Harschel and Monique Spierenburg. Photo: Friso Spoelstra. From photobook Boat People Of Amsterdam.

This article was written by Copenhagen-based freelance correspondent Martin Selsoe Sorensen.

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. Houseboats 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 showrooms floating on a hull of concrete.

Dirkmarine house on water

Dirkmarine house on the water

“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 houseboats 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 e-Magazine.

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.

Dirkmarine house on water

Dirkmarine house on the water

On top of being maintenance-free for a century, the concrete hull has high stability and improves sea life; mussels and seaweed grow on the hull, which attracts fish and shrimp.

Floating homeowners 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 seawater, run it through a heat pump made to withstand saltwater, and generate the underfloor heating and all the warm water needed on a floating home.”

 

Latitude & Size Variations

A newcomer to lakes and canals is Friday, a spin-off from the University of Coimbra on the Mondego river north of Lisbon, Portugal. The startup is delivering its first FloatWing floating homes to clients in Zanzibar, France and China this summer.

The FloatWing is built in five different sizes on a platform six meters in width and 10 to 18 meters in length. They come with a guarantee of being up to 80 percent energy self-sufficient in a year depending on the latitude and size of solar panels. So while the house is built for any sheltered water between Dubai and Tromsø’s frosty fjords north of the Arctic Circle in Norway, the self-sufficiency won’t be the same if clients want to keep the internal temperature at a comfort level of 20 to 25 degrees Celsius, which are FloatWing standards.

“In Portugal, you won’t need the generator between April and September as the solar panels creates the energy the house needs. We’ve been researching various locations for the autonomy of the house and if it sits in Tromsø then it won’t be like in Portugal or Dubai. There the electrical autonomy would be 20 percent of a year cycle,” professor Fernando Seabra Santos, Friday’s CEO, told ArchiExpo e-Magazine.

While the company’s homes are built on a fiberglass catamaran construction, the materials used in the living areas are all wood.

“We use natural materials from this part of the world. The entire house is insulated with a ten centimeter sandwich of cork and we use Nordic pine wood as internal material. Not just for walls and floors, but also for the kitchen, closets and toilet. Floating homes often use more artificial materials like plastic and fiberglass, but ours are natural,” said Santos.

Courtesy of Friday

“Our first prototype was made of steel, but we chose to go with fiberglass to lower the weight of the house by three to four tons. The choice of a catamaran shape makes it very stabile. If you put 12 people on one side of the house it only tilts by one degree,” he said.

All of the technical parts, the batteries and water management are kept in the floaters. So is the wastewater management that offers three stages of treatment including inverse osmosis purifying the water to a degree where it’s almost drinkable.

Concrete vs Fiberglass

Unlike the heavier concrete hulls offered by other manufacturers, the fiberglass catamaran is mobile both on land and at sea. The company delivers the floating home and offers to transport it in two or three standard containers and reassemble anywhere. At sea, it’s fitted to move by itself.

Courtesy of Friday

“Our houses have two outboard motors offering a moderate speed of about four knots. The idea is that you may choose to sleep in a new place every night. It gives you full autonomy,” said Friday CEO Fernando Seabra Santos.

“It’s when you open the glass walls and the space doubles, you really feel you are on the water. The breeze fills the house and it’s an amazing sensation.”

pub
Advertisement
pub
Advertisement
pub
Advertisement
pub
Advertisement
pub
Advertisement