Beauty, Function and Performance

Our friend Mike, a professor of architecture at KSU, was nice enough to meet with us to discuss some of our beginning questions about the house. One question we were left with was what balance of beauty (aesthetic considerations), function (how the house will work for our needs) and performance (how energy and resource efficient the house will be) we are looking for. Of course, the answer is: we want it all!! But, realistically, we have to consider that there will be trade-offs. If we are honest with ourselves, the priorities come down like this:
1) Function: of course, function has to win out. We can't have features for aesthetic or performance reasons that compromise how the house will work for our needs.
2) Beauty: One of the big points of building my own house, rather than moving into someone else's house, is that I have a really particular aesthetic that I'm seeking. Building is a really long, scary, stressful, expensive process. We're willing to engage in the process to get a house that feels really right to us, and the look of it is a huge part of that.
3) Performance: We really do want to have a house that is as efficient as possible while still addressing 1 & 2.

So, one of the big questions is where the trade-offs will lie. We plan to meet with Mike again in a few weeks. I'm starting this particular post to begin collecting questions about features that we want that may conflict with performance.
1) Mike would like the front porch to wrap around the house to connect with a sunroom/porch on the back of the house. We plan to have the garage on the north side of the house (thought that would be good, to block the main house from the wind. So, the porch would need to wrap around the south side. We know that our southern windows will need to have some overhang to block the summer sun. But, would a porch provide too much shading and block the sun from warming our house in the winter? What if it was narrow?
2) What types of flooring materials would be good to use with ground source heating? We like to have bedrooms carpeted. How much would that interfere with the performance of radiant heating?
3) What types of flooring materials work well as a thermal mass to store heat? What are the worst materials? If what we want for our flooring (either for beauty or function) doesn't match up with our need for thermal mass, what would be an alternative thermal mass?

Okay, that's it for now. More later.