A house that levels itself
Expandable from 2.4 to 4 metres, self-levelling, designed for autonomy — the prototype that gave everything its name.
The question came in 2015: what if you could travel and work at the same time? For years it stayed at drawing, thinking, measuring and drawing again. Until in 2020, in the middle of the corona period, an empty warehouse became available in Zaandam. Within a few months there were definitive construction drawings and the first steel frame was welded.
The living unit is expandable: 2.4 metres wide in transport — narrow enough for ordinary road haulage — and extended to 4 metres in place, giving 16 to 32 square metres. No foundation is needed: the undercarriage levels itself, on almost any surface. Set it down, extend it, live in it. And when it leaves, the site stays as it was.
Everything I had come across in twenty years of building came together in this one object. A welded steel frame with timber construction on top. Resol foam insulation. A facade of stainless steel — maintenance-free, with the heat pump's heat emission built into the facade itself. In the ceiling, dimmers and sensors for light, smoke, CO₂, humidity and temperature, and motor control for the skylight blinds. The meter cabinet was soldered together in the evenings on the living-room carpet.
The common thread is autonomy. Own power from the sun, an own 24-volt DC grid, a recirculation shower to save water, and energy management that makes it all work together. In 2021 the house got a name: Homer. The name stuck — the energy management system that now runs at businesses is called Homer EMS, after this house.
The prototype stands in the workshop and is still under construction; the building happens in the hours left over, and along the way a son was born too. Every part that gets finished is immediately a test: from the extension mechanism to the DC grid, everything first has to prove itself here.
Whether there will ever be more than one, I don't know. What matters is what this one specimen shows: that design, steel, wood, installation and software can be one thing. It is the only project without a foundation — but with firmware.