Elements of the home included a vegetable garden, chickens, rabbits, a fish pond, beehives, a composting toilet, solar power and more.

"[3] In 1972 Sim Van der Ryn, Bill & Helga Olkowski, and other architects, engineers, and biologists in the San Francisco Bay Area held a series of meetings at restaurants ("usually Chinese")[2] to form the Farallones Institute,[1] which was founded as a non-profit research and educational organization focused on studying self-reliant living and developing sustainable environmental practices at an urban scale.

[4] Shortly after its founding, the Farallones Institute proceeded with a project to create a house that would be capable of combining, or “integrating”, principles of energy conservation, water conservation, urban agriculture, domestic waste recycling, solar energy collection, home composting, and in-house food growth to create a self-sufficient demonstration house to showcase their ideas to the public.

[1][4] Bill and Helga Olkowski proposed to have this house built in an urban setting as they wanted to show that cities could become, in their words, “ecologically stable and healthy places to live”.

[1] In wake of the crisis, the Farallones Institute envisioned a house that could provide its own food and energy in case gasoline, electricity, and natural gas were ever expected to become scarce and unaffordable.

[1] According to one report, "The group secured $110,000 from private foundations and institutes for labor and materials to rehabilitate the run-down urban house and fit it with solar energy and non-polluting sanitation and other systems.

[5] Bill Olkowski wrote in 2011, "About 1974 or so Andy Pollack was a student at Antioch College West in San Francisco where we taught, in addition [to teaching] in the Man and Environment Program at UC Berkeley.

[7] Other key personnel involved in the project that were credited by Van der Ryn in the introduction to the book published by the Sierra Club included Jim Campe, Jeff Poetsch, and Sheldon Leon, who were responsible for much of the house’s construction, Tom Javits, the resident manager of the house, and Harlow Daugherty, who provided the original grant to begin the project.

"[2] In order to keep the water in the fishpond from becoming stagnant, a windmill known as the Savonius Rotor was constructed out of recycled oil drums, salvaged lumber, and scrap metal.

[7] The side yard in front of the main entrance along the south-facing wall grew strawberries, asparagus, artichokes, culinary herbs, and rhubarb for the house's residents, as well as chrysanthemums and comfrey to feed to chickens and rabbits.

In addition to the yards surrounding the house and the greenhouse, a "roof-top garden" on the main floor porch overlooking the backyard had containers filled with compost to grow tea mints and salad greens.

[7] In order to sustain the high amounts of food production at the house, kitchen wastes, weeds, plant debris, and animal manure were composted into soil.

[7] Fresh air entered the composting chamber through ducts in its trap door, causing the material to lose 95% of its bulk as carbon dioxide and water vapor, which were vented to the outside.

[7] Wastewater from the kitchen continued to be drained into the sewer instead, due to its concentration of soaps, solid waste, and other chemicals making it unadvisable to use for vegetation.

[7] The insulation allowed the cupboard to have a much cooler temperature year-round compared to its surroundings, reducing the amount of mechanical refrigeration needed in the kitchen.

[7] The bathroom, located adjacent to the kitchen in the northwest corner of the building’s main floor, had a south-facing window which used a passive solar heating system.

[7] Manually operable shutters, accessible from the back porch, were installed to ensure that the heat would either not escape during colder nights or not be collected at all during warmer months.

The water entered the copper piping under the solar collector, picking up heat and naturally rising to the top of the attic storage tank.

"[5] In order to spread their ideas, members of the Farallones Institute, including der Ryn and the Olkowskis, wrote a guide that was published by the Sierra Club in 1979 which provided methodologies, design strategies, and other information for its readers to study when considering building similar houses of their own.

In order to maintain the extensive range of features of the house, a large amount of labor was needed, which was typically supplied by unpaid students.

By the time Sim Van der Ryn had left Berkeley for Sacramento to establish the state’s Office of Appropriate Technology,[6] students became more and more unwilling to provide the heavy and dirty labor required to maintain the house.

[4] Bill Olkowski stated of the book, "The first edition was erroneously published as if Sim van der Ryn was the primary author and designer, but he was not.

"[13] Olkowski also stated about the book-editing process:[2] I wrote the final draft of the book (took about three months of daily work, in between other jobs and teaching) with Helga as always, and with Tom Javits making major contributions, particularly in various designs and drawings.

Not that the chapter was anything special, but it was focused on how people could maximize solar house heating by such simple means as manipulating existing shades and blinds, for example.

"[14] The report People power: what communities are doing to counter inflation (1980) recommended it as "a resource guide for the city dweller who wants to develop an economic self-sustaining lifestyle.