At the heart of the 4,000 square foot home is a hybrid core of concrete and wood framing. While some of its walls are rough, board-formed concrete, others are hyper-smooth and seemingly polished. Still others are articulated with bands of exposed aggregate and color.

All form a theatrical backdrop for the furniture, objects and fixtures inside.

Designer Fu-Tung Cheng said his concept was to create a building that, while minimalist, would convey design and craft by “playing” with and controlling the mix of the concrete walls as they were being poured.

“I plunged my hands into the concrete and the re-bar,” he said. “I was stuffing pigment into the forms. I literally bled while it was pouring – my blood is in that house.”

He used a formwork-reducing slip-cast technique to produce the finished concrete. Casting in single-height, 4-foot “lifts,” one pour on top of another, enabled Cheng to manipulate the material more easily than larger “lifts.”

“It’s layered much like a rammed-earth house,” he said. “When the cement is pouring down, you have to reach down in order to get those striations, those yellow or blue bands of concrete.”

He wanted a home that was nothing close to a veneer, he said. He wanted as few compromises as possible, decrying new construction that’s no more than a series of layers – of sheetrock, wires, pipes and stucco. “This is not a façade,” he said. “This is a different look, a different feel and a different structure. When you create something like that, it means you can wrap some delicacies around it.”

That means, for example, polycarbonate translucent panels and light fixtures with twigs inserted by David Wards of a company called Sticks & Stones.

“We designed the light fixtures using his twigs,” Cheng said. “It naturalizes and humanizes the house – it gives it life. I want your nerve endings rubbing off these very friendly surfaces – there’s a certain tactile quality that I like people to feel.”

For more on Cheng Design, go to www.chengdesign.com. For more on Matthew Millman Photography, go to www.matthewmillman.com. For more on David Wards and Sticks & Stones, go to www.sticks-n-stones.net [[Show as slideshow]] Photography by Matthew Millman

“It’s an alluring, addictive material,” Bustin said of the cement-based eco composites and products he makes. “I can create anything – from warm and silky smooth, to rough and raw, to highly polished.”

He learned about concrete artisanship and design from Buddy Rhodes, the Californian who pioneered the concept two decades ago. Bustin was national director of sales for Rhodes, travelling the nation to preach the gospel of adding color to concrete countertops, seating and sculpture. Now he and his brother are partners in Raleigh-based Meld USA.

One of his firm’s newest and most sustainable products is called ecoX. It’s made of up to 70 percent post-industrial recycled material, which means it offers potential LEED credits in two categories – MR4 and MR5 – and helps divert waste from landfills too. He markets it as an ecologically sound alternative to granite countertops.

Meld USA’s concrete slabs in specified colors are now distributed by CaraGreen, a distributor of sustainable architectural materials.

But it’s the creative process inherent in the materials he works with and revels in every day.

“It’s very fluid,” he said. “There’s a lot of design flexibility – I can make anything from a bathroom tile to a door.”

Visit Meld USA at http://www.meldusa.com and CaraGreen at http://www.caragreen.com.[[Show as slideshow]]