Vernacular Home Rural House by Xinyun Li is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2026 A' Design Award in Sustainable Products, Projects and Green Design Competition Category.
IronSustainable Product· 2026
Vernacular Home Rural House
by Xinyun Li
A' Design Award Winner in Sustainable Product Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #174956The Design
About Vernacular Home Rural House
The Vernacular Home in Bangladesh is designed using local materials, mud, bamboo, straw, and bricks made from local soil. Responding to hot climates and long monsoons, it features a steep roof, a raised veranda, and cross ventilation for passive cooling. Openings on windward and leeward walls release heat, while double brick cavities insulate. Clay pots embedded in the tea house wall cool the air. Using liter bottles of light for interiors, the home includes bedrooms, a kitchen, a toilet, cow sheds, and a tea house with a retail supporting their livelihood while ensuring privacy.
The Recognition
About the A' Design Award
Vernacular Home Rural House is an Iron A' Design Award winner, a prestigious recognition granted to good designs that meet the professional and industrial requirements expected from well-designed creations. Iron winners demonstrate great skill, high specialization, expert understanding, and creative capacity of their creators. Vernacular Home Rural House is expected to be a highly regarded, admired, and cherished creation that is practical and innovative. This Iron A' Design Award-winning design integrates industry best practices and has competent technical characteristics linked with know-how and talent. Vernacular Home Rural House is respected for its thoroughness and is designed to provide quality of life improvements that help make the world a better place.
Interviews
Design Interview
What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
The core idea of the design was to create a comfortable and climate-responsive home within a very limited budget by relying as much as possible on local materials, local construction techniques, and the existing architectural language of the community. Rather than introducing an unfamiliar building system, the design responds to the local environment, climate, and way of life, creating a home that is affordable, practical, and deeply rooted in its context.
What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
My main focus was to explore how local materials and traditional construction techniques could respond directly to the local climate. The design considers conditions such as heavy rainfall and hot weather, and instead of relying on advanced technology or mechanical systems, it uses indigenous materials and familiar building methods to create a more comfortable microclimate. The goal was to show how simple, locally rooted solutions can improve environmental comfort while remaining practical, accessible, and closely connected to the place.
What sets this design apart from other similar or resembling concepts?
What sets this design apart from similar projects is its simplicity and strong reliance on local resources. The house is built almost entirely with locally available materials and does not depend on advanced technologies or complex building systems. Instead, the design uses spatial organization, architectural form, natural ventilation, shading, and material properties to improve the microclimate and create a more comfortable living environment. At the same time, the project was achieved at a very low construction cost, making the approach practical and accessible within its local context.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- The Vernacular Home in Modonpur, Bangladesh, is a sustainable house built with local materials like mud, straw, bamboo, bricks, and tin sheets. Designed for a family of four, it supports living, working, and livelihood. It responds to the hot, rainy climate with a raised veranda, steep roof, and cross-ventilation strategies in the facade design. Clay pots on the wall cool the tea house, while 'liter bottles of light' brighten interiors, showing a low-cost, low-impact design philosophy.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- tin sheet: 2' width * 8' length
Brick: 9 5/8" length* 4 5/8" height * 3" depth
Pottery: large opening is 5" R, and the small side opening is 1.5" R
The mud wall is 10" thick
Bamboo: 1.5" R - Tags
- sustainability, vernacular home, rural, house, traditional building, local materials, climate
- Production Technology
- Bangladesh's locally made bricks and tin sheets.
Natural straw, mud, pottery, and bamboo.
The brick and the tin sheets are standard sizes and are manufactured in the local factories.
Traditional handmade mud and the way of polishing.
The potteries on the mud walls are smaller than the local typical size, which were made in the neighboring village.
The way of tying the straw is their vernacular type. - Design Challenge
- Use the vernacular materials and design the buildings to face the local climate to make the microclimate more comfortable. Control the building budget and labor cost under 2500 USD.
- Research
- Two weeks were spent in the village to become familiar with local materials and to study traditional mud construction techniques as well as straw-tying methods. During this period, I also researched the climate of Para Dash and analyzed the vernacular architectural language, considering how new strategies could be integrated into the design to improve the microclimate. The needs and expectations of the local residents were carefully documented and incorporated into the final design.
- Inspiration
- This project explores the social responsibility of architects. Despite rapid technological advancements, many regions around the world remain underdeveloped. People in these areas are more directly exposed to natural conditions, yet they also have the right to live a better life. As architects, we should not only make better use of locally available materials but also respond to the most immediate needs of these communities by designing housing that is practical and suitable for widespread use.
- Project Duration
- It is designed in Modonpur, Bangladesh, a very natural village called Dash Para. The design phase lasted 4 months. It is a concept design.
- Operation Flow
- Given the hot climate in Bangladesh and long monsoon season, the design addresses thermal comfort and climate responsiveness through spatial layout, façade design, and roof form. A raised veranda protects against flooding, and steeply pitched roofs ensure efficient rainwater runoff. Rooms are arranged for optimal cross-ventilation, with varying window heights on windward and leeward sides to expel heat. On the tea house façade, locally made clay pots from a neighboring village are inserted into the mud wall to help cool the air by compressing airflow, enhancing microclimate comfort.
- Image Credits
- Image #1: Xinyun Li
Image #2: Xinyun Li
Image #3: Xinyun Li
Image #4: Xinyun Li
Image #5: Xinyun Li
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