Pod Living

"It's really nice waking up to having a tree in your bedroom," says Matthew Selanger of the innovative sleeping structures he designed with his wife, Maria. "When we sleep in a standard bedroom now, we really miss the pod."

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The Salengers say they were able to add the two bedroom pods for about $7,000 each, significantly less than the $20,000 to $30,000 a typical bedroom addition costs.

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Portable and easy to move should the couple relocate, the pods rest lightly on the lawn behind the main house.

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It’s a fact of physics that hot air rises, and this simple concept is all Maria and Matthew Salenger needed to design a passive cooling system for the backyard pods they use as bedrooms at their house in Tempe, where the average daily temperature is 86 degrees. The light, steel-framed structures float on stilts above the yard, allowing cooler air to circulate underneath. On hotter days when this isn’t enough, operable windows along the roof line and vents in the floors allow hot air to escape out the top and draw the same cooler air up from the lawn. By relying on this energy-efficient system during all but the hottest months (when they run a small air-conditioning unit only in the evenings when they’re home), the couple, who work together as the architecture firm coLAB, has chopped their monthly power bills in half—no small feat in a climate where summertime temperatures can top 115 degrees.

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