Greensgrow Holiday Bazaar

Sat. & Sun, Dec. 10th & 11 + 17th & 18th

11am to 4pm (rain or shine)

2501 E. Cumberland St.

Philadelphia, PA 19125

Details & directions: http://www.facebook.com/events/291586800852879/

We’re excited to be sharing a table with our talented friends, Be Frank. Make sure to check out their gorgeous holiday cards. We hope to see you there on Sunday!

Bench Dog Design is pleased to announce that we have been selected to design and fabricate a new podium for Mayor Michael Nutter! Working with the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, Bench Dog will create two different mobile podiums made of reclaimed wood. The podiums will reflect the goals of Greenworks Philadelphia, the Mayor’s comprehensive plan to make Philadelphia the country’s number one green city. The podiums will be used in events and speaking engagements throughout the city.

Although the design has not been finalized yet, below are a few concept sketches:

Bench Dog Design is excited for this great opportunity. Look for the final designs and progress work in the coming weeks.

More photos of the house and tour to come on our Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/benchdogdesign

Be sure to stop by Postgreen’s Avant Garage Tourstravaganza on Wednesday June 29th. This reception/party/tour will showcase their new residential project, Avant Garage, in Fishtown. The project consist of 4 lots just behind Palmer Park. The tours of the first 2 homes (about half way complete) will focus on their sustainable building features, along with project partners and consultants to give you the low-down on how products work, are made/constructed, and what makes them green.

Bench Dog will be there to celebrate this new project and showcase our reclaimed wood furniture.

For more information, see Postgreen’s blog post on the event.

Hope to see you there!
Visit the event page and RSVP on Facebook.

Avant Garage Tourstravaganza
June 29, 2011, 5:30pm to 10pm
401 Memphis St., Philadelphia, PA 19125

Alongside local musicians and locally brewed beer, Bench Dog featured wares made from locally salvaged wood. With a focus on function, our planter boxes and toolbox caddy were a hit. Below are a few photos of our table.

Bench Dog Design specializes in custom work of all scales, for inside and outside. Let us know if you have a project you’d like to discuss, email: info@benchdogdesign.com

The Trenton Ave Arts Festival in Fishtown is Saturday May 21st from noon to 5pm. This all day event features the Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby.  The festival is a celebration of all thing local and will be filled with live music, food and 150+ artists and vendors.

This will be Bench Dog Design’s second year as a vendor. Last year we focused on frames (both pictures and mirror frames)– this year we’ll be showcasing a series of new plant/garden items. The carefully crafted item include herb planters, windowboxes and more.

Below is a sneak peek at an indoor herb plant for kitchen counter tops.

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Date: Saturday May 21st
Time: noon to 5pm (sprinkle or shine)
Place: Trenton Avenue in Fishtown (between E. Norris Street and Frankford Avenue at York Street)
Getting there:
–By Bike (there will be free valet bike paking at the corner of Trenton Ave and Dauphin St)
–By El: Berks (just a 2 block walk. follow the music, the smell of food . . . or the signs they have posted)

Hope to see you there.

Visit the festival’s blog for more information and artist highlights.

Bench Dog Design is excited to be participating in this year’s Building Industry Assoc. of Philadelphia (BIA) Green Tour. The tour will highlight sustainably designed projects in the Graduate Hospital area, including our own Montrose Green rowhouse renovation. Other participants include 777 S. Broad St, our friends at Bancroft Green, and a historic renovation on Delancey Street. See below for more details!

It’s One of the BIA’s Most Popular Events–The Green Tour,  April 28

Join the BIA for the 3rd Annual Green Tour on Thursday, April 28 from 2 til 5 and see what’s coming up green in the Graduate Hospital and Rittenhouse Square neighborhoods. This vibrant and walkable part of Center City has become a popular area for new green construction. You’ll begin at 777 South Broad (click here for directions), with stops that include townhomes like Montrose Green and a handsome historic renovation that’s gone green.

Green roofs, pervious paving, geothermal heating and cooling, innovative insulation products, repurposed woods, solar, and balanced heat recovery ventilation are some of the technologies you’ll see in place.

Happy hour at the Black Sheep Pub ends the tour.

Download a registration form here.

Registration for members is just $45 ($55 for non-members) and includes happy hour. There will be a $10 surcharge for registrations received after April 22 so download a form and register today.

Email Bench Dog Design at info@benchdogdesign.com or post a message on our Facebook page if you have any questions.  We hope to see you there!

Check out the April issue of Dwell Magazine with the theme Cheap and Chic: Great Design for Less.

The 100k House in the Fishtown/East Kensington section of Philadelphia is featured in the “Dwellings” section. It is part of a larger piece entitled “Dollar, Dollar Build Y’all.” Focusing on cost effective homes, it contains 3 separate articles chronicling the journey of building affordable modern homes in different cities. (In addition to Philly, homes in Seattle and Tijuana are featured.) The ambitious 100k House by Interface Studio Architects has been praised for its sustainable practices and is a forerunner of possibilities with reaches far beyond the neighborhood and the city.

In the article titled “See What Develops” (Story by Aaron Britt, Photos by Mark Mahaney) Bench Dog Design’s custom dining table is mentioned a few times in the article and captured in 2 of the photos.

We’re honored to be published in Dwell alongside our friends at Postgreen and ISA.

We are in the final stages of a 3-story, custom designed, single family home in the Graduate Hospital neighborhood of Philadelphia. It is a ‘design-build’ project where Bench Dog Design was responsible for the architectural design and the construction of the home.

The project is a new construction “infill” type where the old abandoned house was deconstructed, all the material was salvaged, and a new house was framed up on the existing basement. The home is on track to be Energy Star Qualified. We actually designed the project to a LEED Gold standard and are projecting up to 50% energy savings. The home is roughly 2,000 SF (including a partially finished basement) and has 3-BR, 2.5 Ba, and a deck off the master suite. There will also be a full green roof with patio and rainwater harvesting system installed this coming fall.

One of the main features in the house is the centrally located “thermal chimney” (also known as a “solar chimney”) which provides passive ventilation for the home most of the year. At the top of the open shaft there are remote controlled motorized skylights that vent open to allow warm air to escape. This feature also provides another important service: it allows natural light to penetrate down into the central areas of the house. The section diagram below shows how it works:

Some of the sustainable features include:

• Eco-friendly + recycled finishes
• Reclaimed + FSC certified woods
• Passive ventilation system
• High-performance building envelope
• Daylighting + solar shading
• Energy-efficient fixtures + system

The house was designed for a landscape architect who desired a strong connection to the outside. This was accomplished with extra-large windows and also by placing the kitchen in the middle of the house and the living room at the back. This allowed us to have full glazing across the back of the house with large sliding glass doors (below).

Another innovative feature of the house is the facade. It is a rainscreen cladding system using both fiber-cement panels and wood planks. This is a ventilated system that allows the facade to “breath” by letting any moisture behind the cladding make it’s way down and allowing air to circulate up…continually “drying out” the building envelope.  The two woods we used for the rainscreens were IPE (Brazilian Walnut) on the front bay (shown at top) and Black Locust on the rear bay (shown above). The main portion of the front facade is clad in high-density, fiber-cement panels and the outside of the front bay is wrapped with Zinc-coated recycled metal panels.

We were able to do numerous custom woodworking items in the house as well. One of the main pieces is a 2-story high wall, clad with reclaimed Heart Pine floor planks (below). This wood, as with all the reclaimed wood used in the project, came from the original house and were salvaged during the demolition process.

Above is the powder room wall-hung vanity constructed of reclaimed floor joists. We integrated a beautiful Duravit sink on top.

We are currently in the process of wrapping up a few other interior projects. These include a custom built-in bookcase (made from reclaimed joists and roof boards), two bartops (made from joists), and a 7′x7′ barn door (made with reclaimed roof boards). We will post some pictures of these as soon as they are installed.

It was apparent that the favorite item in the lot was our Wide Plank Wall Mirror. The frame was made from 8 inch wide roof boards salvaged from a rowhome at 18th and Carpenter Streets in South Philly. –SOLD–