The moment Wenji Zhang saw photos of the No Footprint Wood House, in April 2023, she was smitten. The wood-slatted house in the rainforest of southwestern Costa Rica was for sale — and its delicate beauty, its openness to nature, stunned her.
She showed the images to her husband, Paul Lehmann, who also liked the design, but was hesitant. He promptly pointed out that, only two months earlier, they had purchased another, far more conventional house in a nearby village as a tropical retreat from their main home in a suburb of Cleveland. But a week later, once back in Costa Rica, they decided to visit the rainforest house in Puntarenas province anyway — just to see it.
Dr. Lehmann, 68, describes himself as a “rational guy” — a levelheaded scientist, who, like his wife, Dr. Zhang, 48, is an immunologist. But once he stepped over that threshold, high in the hills, and looked across the lush jungle to the nearby Pacific Coast, he said in an interview, “it was love at first sight.”
“This was like a temple, a work of art immersed in nature,” he said, “and undeniably the place for us.”
On the spot, he insisted they buy it, and somehow find a solution for the Costa Rican house they already owned. (Fortunately, he said, that same day, a lifelong friend offered to purchase it.)
There was another complication, but they didn’t let it get in their way either. Dr. Lehmann — an adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve University, and the founder of an Ohio-based biotech company — had had a spinal-cord injury in early 2019, and it left him with extensive paralysis and limited mobility.
“I realized I could spend the rest of my life chained to a bed,” he said, “but instead, I decided to do the opposite — really live.”
Dr. Lehmann still runs his biotech company, where, he said, he and his wife work full time, often remotely from Costa Rica. He can navigate modest distances with a walker and manage stairs with assistance — and was immediately comfortable with the 270-square-meter (2,906-square-foot) house’s flowing, flat and largely open main-floor plan. A simple rectangle, it centers on a double-height great room that combines open dining, kitchen and living areas. With folding walls, the flexible interior — made mostly of teak — provided him with a ground-floor office and bedroom alongside the soaring space. (There are also two upstairs sleeping mezzanines, overlooking the great room.)
The house’s original owner, Christophe Nieuwe Weme, had been intimately involved with realizing the design, personally overseeing the entire construction process. But a year and a half after moving in, he said in an interview, he and his then-partner decided to sell the house to make it easier to spend extended periods near family in Switzerland.
“I still tear up at photos of it,” Mr. Nieuwe Weme said. “With that deck, it felt like a wooden ship floating in the jungle — it was magical to stand there, watching migrating whales through a telescope. I loved awakening to birdsong and swimming laps in the pool.”
Though the home’s design suited him — and now Drs. Lehmann, Zhang and their 12-year-old son, Aten — remarkably well, it wasn’t created entirely from scratch. Beyond being an ideal perch in the jungle, the house was part of a larger environmental mission. It is one of a series of No Footprint Houses (also called N.F.H.s or Casas Sin Huella) by A-01, a Costa Rica-based architecture and urban design firm. With its own nonprofit foundation and think tank, the firm designed these houses with a goal of minimizing their carbon and energy footprints.
Most of the No Footprint Houses (10 exist, so far) have veil-like, louvered exterior walls, with vast sections that can open to the outdoors. They are assembled on site using modular, prefabricated components, and many of the homes are raised on piers, gently hovering over the land, leaving it almost completely undisturbed, even during construction.
With 12 additional No Footprint Houses currently in design or construction, A-01 is now researching prototypes for northern European climates, as well as urban settings — with aspirations to, some day, create a No Footprint Tower, as well.
The N.F.H. series began in 2015 “as a research project to show what decarbonized residential construction could be,” said Oliver Schütte, the architect who founded A-01 with his life partner, Marije van Lidth de Jeude, a cultural anthropologist.
Decarbonization involves lowering and eliminating carbon dioxide emissions by replacing fossil fuel-reliant materials and processes with those produced by clean, renewable energy; improving energy performance; and offsetting emissions, often with measures that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The No Footprint Houses grew out of A-01’s 2010 collaboration on a “road map” to decarbonize Costa Rica countrywide. (Building on the country’s existing achievement of a nationwide power grid already fed by at least 98-percent renewable sources, the government rolled out its National Decarbonization Plan in 2019.)
As the No Footprint concept emerged, A-01 began to build its ever-evolving “N.F.H. Toolbox,” a catalog of prefabricated, modular components, plus finishes, that clients can match with specific site conditions, tastes and budgets. The firm completed its first prototype house in 2018 in Ojochal, Costa Rica. Before Mr. Nieuwe Weme embarked on his own project, he rented that house for two months to see what worked, what didn’t and what could be improved. Afterward, he asked the architects to design the first all-wood N.F.H. for him, replacing structural steel and imported lumber with sustainably harvested Costa Rican teak.
Eliminating steel helped the new house achieve 80-percent decarbonization (as compared with a standardized “base case,” a building of the same size and function, but constructed with conventional materials and methods), whereas the original N.F.H. had achieved only 40-percent decarbonization. This was calculated through the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s rigorous Life Cycle Assessment, which factors in the carbon and energy costs over the course of a building’s construction and lifetime.
Completed in early 2022 for $500,000, the No Footprint Wood House took 16 months, though simpler, smaller N.F.H.s, on less challenging sites, have gone up in only three months.
For the original prototype, an 18-wheel rig delivered all the building components, plus a construction crane, in a single truckload. But here, the steep, winding, unpaved road only allowed for small trucks, unable to transport a crane. So, each component of the house was sized for a small number of workers to lift safely onto the building, with manual methods including ropes.
Like other No Footprint Houses, this one has almost no glass panes. With mostly operable louvers and exterior walls that fold open, abundant airflow — with constant breezes from the ocean to the west, and mountains to the east — keeps the house, according to the owners, comfortable, even in this tropical climate, and virtually mosquito free.
The Lehmann-Zhang family even removed the mosquito mesh lining the bedroom louvers — and have never needed to switch on the ceiling fans, which spin by themselves with the breezes.
“It’s incredibly open,” said Mr. Nieuwe Weme, “yet animals never came inside — just, occasionally, a parakeet flew though.”
Still, louvers aren’t completely wind- or rainproof, so, Dr. Lehmann said, they have added a few glass panes around sleeping areas.
Dr. Zhang said in an interview that, minor challenges aside, “it’s amazing to live here.”
“We find ourselves following the rhythms of the jungle, going to bed at sunset and rising at daybreak to the sounds of monkeys and birds,” she said. “From our deck, we see big, colorful toucans and macaws.”
And, she added, “it’s a perfect meditative setting” for her daily tea ceremonies and Qigong practice. She has also found like-minded neighbors on their rural road, though they are mostly hidden from view, within the jungle. She, Dr. Lehmann and Aten had planned to continue basing themselves in Ohio, but they spend so much time at their rainforest retreat that it hardly seems like a second home anymore.
“We love it. The space is so flexible that sometimes our son practices soccer inside; the acoustics are fantastic for concerts; and more,” Dr. Lehmann said. “If you don’t like living so close to nature, this might not be for you — but for us, it’s a dream come true.”
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