Affordability and eco-friendly are often not used in the same sentence. This often happens as marketers ride the eco-friendly bandwagon for excess profits.
This is not the case with bamboo flooring. Sustainable equals competitive pricing when one compares bamboo flooring to other solid wood and engineered flooring options. Case Architects designed a modern & affordable eco-friendly home which includes bamboo, see how they did it …Here’s the house:
Look at the natural bamboo flooring – they have used in-floor radiant heat under the flooring.
Now if you look at the ceiling, you’ll see that they have used shutterboards for the base of the upstairs – you guessed it – bamboo floor. Our experience is that when one uses a sound dampening underlay in this type of design, you end up with a very quiet upstairs floor. Actually, in one design, the kids playroom uses exactly the same design & you cannot even hear the kids playing upstairs – even when directly underneath them. More on that in another post.
Notice the use of bamboo boards for the stair treads. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the architects used 20mm thick bamboo boards. The reason they could do this is because of the incredible structural strength of bamboo (it has a higher tensile strength than cold pressed steel).
There are so many other great aspects to this design (obviously our main interest is the application of bamboo in the design). Go have a look at the rest of the post at the link above.
About The Oriental Bamboo Team