Maui Vacation Home Allows 'Play' With Green Technology

Founder of LifeEdited Graham Hill is taking the company's mission statement, “Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy," to Maui, Hawaii.

Hill has built a few small apartments in Manhattan with moving parts including sliding walls and expandable furniture, but purchased 2.2 acres of land in Haiku, Hawaii and began designing a vacation home. Hill explains to The New York Times that working on a stand-alone house offered new ways to use green technology, such as thin-film solar panels on the standing-seam metal roof that are almost imperceptible to the eye.

At 1,000 square feet, with an additional 330-square-foot lanai and 1,330-square-foot garage, the resulting house — completed with help from the architecture and engineering firm Hawaii Off-Grid — isn’t exactly small. But it packs a lot into that envelope, including four bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. Three of the bedrooms offer more than a place to sleep. Outfitted with Clei transformable furnishings from Resource Furniture, one bedroom has a Murphy bed with an attached desk that rotates into place, when the bed is closed, to serve as an office.

Read more