Little Green Rooms

Your backyard can have a home office made from recycled materials

Photo: David Croxford

Three years ago, Orion Stanbro made high-end Japanese-style pole houses. Today, he builds something less expensive and more environmentally friendly.

In 2007, Stanbro started Green Sun Designs to build houses made from recycled materials. But he found that creating an entire house from recycled parts was uneconomical and inefficient, so he settled on multipurpose, modular spaces that can fit in backyards and be transported. Stanbro builds on site statewide.

Most of his buildings are 120-square feet or smaller (about 9-by-13 feet), enough for storage or a home office. Rates for a bare structure start at $110 per square foot. “You’re looking at a 100-square-foot building at the price of $11,000, the price of a decent car, and you have your own office,” Stanbro says.

Photo: David Croxford

Re-use Hawaii provides the building materials, all recycled from demolished homes, at a price 40 percent below the cost of new materials. “It allows Hawaii to act like a timber producer,” Stanbro says. “Not only do I have local and cheap material but I also have better quality because of the older wood coming out of houses built in the 1940s and ’50s.”

Stanbro designs and builds each unit himself and will do custom jobs. The model below, Keena, uses sliding doors and was built for Re-use Hawaii.

Green Sun Designs Orion Stanbro 808-547-3663 greenest.sun@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

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