The aptly-named RainShine House, one of the healthiest single-family houses in the United States, which achieved the highest level of “green architecture” possible through the United States Green Building Council’s LEED® [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] for Homes Pilot Program, continues to be recognized for its beauty and sustainable features.
RainShine’s recognition, since its completion in 2009, has been widespread, primarily due to its unique distinction as the first modernist home in the Southeastern United States to achieve the much-coveted LEED Platinum rating. The RainShine blog, http://www.rainshinehouseatlanta.blogspot.com/ continues to be visited daily, and repeatedly, by individuals and organizations from all over the world. The most recent local recognition for this simple, elegant home was from the City of Decatur Historic Preservation Commission who awarded it a 2010 Design Award. Nationally, the home received a 2010 Custom Home Design Award Grand Award for homes under 3,000 square feet conferred by Custom Home Magazine. The consensus of the panel of distinguished judges called it “a great combining of design with eco-features.” and observed “the thin butterfly roof, which floats above a continuous glass clerestory and an artfully-expressed steel structural frame, offers the ideal vessel for rainwater collection and a discreet mounting platform for [the] solar panels” and “….the house…acknowledges its more traditional neighbors in the symmetry of its façade.”
In print, Architectural Record featured RainShine in its online edition Green Home section of their “Green Projects Showcase” and the Sustainable Environment class of Spring 2010 students of William J. Carpenter, professor of Architecture at Southern Polytechnic State University featured it on the cover and in their publication Modern House Book published in May of 2010. Also included in that publication was Mr. Cain’s design for the St. John family in Gillsville, Georgia which also received the Southern Home Award from Southern Living Magazine and awards for Excellence in Architecture from the Georgia Chapter and South Atlantic Regional Council of the American Institute of Architects and was featured in the publication Creating the Inspired House by John Connell published by Taunton Press. RainShine was also featured in the Arquitectura Sustentable magazine 04 issue, based in Mexico.
The RainShine house was also featured in the April 2010 issue of Atlanta Home Improvement magazine’s “Green Home in Rain or Shine” article which featured the very environmentally-sound selection of Nichiha lap siding material.
Certified in April 2009, the RainShine House was featured in the popular Modern Atlanta Home Tour on May 16-17, 2009 and welcomed over 200 individuals through its doors and into its basement to view the five 500-gallon cisterns and talk in depth to everyone on the design team from the builder, Pinnacle Custom Builders and the landscape architect, Lynn Saussy to the rain harvest system designers, RainCatchers of McDonough, Georgia.
The dramatic drilling of the four wells for the geothermal heat pump system was featured in the March 11, 2008 segment of the Discovery Channel’s Planet Green series that focuses on architecture “in synch with the planet”, Renovation Nation, with Emmy Award-winning host, Steve Thomas, formerly of This Old House. Further coverage of the wells being drilled and the rainwater collection system was aired on The Weather Channel in Natalie Allen’s Forecast Earth segment in June 2009.
RainShine was also featured in the 2009 Decatur, Georgia GREENFEST tour of homes this year during the weekend of May 2. This home is so energy efficient that it is anticipated it will consume only 43% of the energy consumed by a similar home built to the standards of the International Energy Conservation Code.
