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Given the amount of trees and other greenery we love to plant into every available nook and cranny, public visibility is not likely to become a significant problem. :-)
Of course you can use screens in a place like Puna. Even a little Nanawale lot can provide enough privacy for an indoor-outdoor bath, I've seen several around, had 2 of my own in my Leilani houses. But they need cleaning regularly, just like windows or they can get nasty and still will have to be replaced every few years.
I did draw up a set of plans a decade or two ago that was pretty much the house you're describing. Instead of screens, they built a carport/bathroom under a huge raised platform which was the rest of the house. There were 'door walls' of big doors on sliding tracks that could all be pushed back into 'door barns' at each corner of the house. The kitchen was in the center, the sleeping areas were sort of tucked into the door barn nooks. They didn't live there full time, though, it was a vacation house.
Another person wanted a 'Bali' house that was raised up in the air. For some reason they wanted a reflecting pool in the living room (water weighs 8 pounds per gallon, the floor reinforcement in that area was massive) and they wanted the ends of the walls to be open with those raised roof ridges found on Bali temples. This was up in the Volcano area, I'm sure they eventually filled in the end walls and added a fireplace. All I can do is let folks know what the conditions are like and then draw up what they want (making sure it's to code, of course.) I'm just a draftsperson.
You can do interesting things with a curving wall around a shower. Kinda like a Nautilus shell. It still has the feel of an open bath, but it's also secluded.
All I can do is let folks know what the conditions are like and then draw up what they want (making sure it's to code, of course.) I'm just a draftsperson.
Hotzcatz, in your opinion can a house with a screen panel outer wall and and sliding door inner wall (as I described) be still compliant with building codes? I thought the codes require an immobile wall of X thickness.
It can be built to code, but you'll have to add in a few bits of shear wall (walls that resist various directions of force) here and there. You can also put your shear walls inside the screen walls and make the screen walls non structural.
You'll need some stationary walls to hold the roof up and as a place for the screens and doors to move to, so all that can be made into the structural walls.
When that house with the sliding door walls was built, that was before Hurricane Iniki (Hurricane Ewa, too, for that matter) so the building code was much more relaxed than now. But, the corner door barns can be made to meet building code.
Thank you Hotzcatz.
I'm looking at shear wall presentations... interesting stuff. The strongest variant they offer is with steel. Steel might work on the Mainland but here in Hawaii, if lava starts to lick it, I'd imagine that steel will likely conduct the heat up where it connects to wood, etc...
If lava starts to lick it I'm afraid the house is finished, regardless of construction materials.
Several years ago I did see a dodecagon house on Kona side at about 2,000 ft or so that had tall sliding wall panels all around, with huge ohia posts as the structural members. No concerns about privacy, as the parcel was large and remote.
Dunno if the owner had obtained a permit for the home, but he was obviously a skilled builder.
You can hope that the heat in the lava conducts enough heat up the structural steel members to catch the house on fire. You can get fire insurance, but not lava insurance.
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