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The walls are stuffed with old newspapers, the stones are
from a nearby lake, and the floor is grass. No, this
isn’t
the vision of Willy Wonka’s crunchy cousin; it’s
high-end residential construction with a focus on environmental
responsibility. And it’s happening here.
Frank
Laskey’s
company, Capital Construction, had been building commercial
properties, like car dealerships
and hotels,
around Saratoga Springs when he met Michael Phinney four
years ago. Phinney, an RPI graduate, is an architect
with expertise
in green building. He was the architect in charge of the
new Department of Environmental Conservation building
in downtown
Albany, the first building in-state to be certified by
the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy & Environmental
Design program.
Phinney
says he and Laskey each wanted to design “houses
that were green that didn’t look like eco-ships, but
beautiful homes, responsive to the environment, built out
of environmentally
responsible materials,” and agreed to partner up for
a project in the future. That time came a year and a half
ago
when a homeowner approached them wanting to build a green
house. Not a greenhouse, but a green house. The man’s
wife had chemical sensitivities, which meant many conventional
building
materials could not be used due to the strong chemicals
present in them, so they wanted to go green in Greenfield.
“As
the project evolved, I realized that this is the direction
I really want to go in,” Laskey says, because this
principled building method shares what he calls his “core
values.” Phinney
started his own company to concentrate on environmental
design work while Laskey restructured his business
to focus more on
green residential construction.
Laskey
then bought 95 rural acres in Wilton to build a green
residential housing development.
Last month, he and Phinney got
the green light to start construction on the flagship house
of “Louden
Ridge,” a planned (though not yet-fully approved) subdivision
of 22 new homes to be built on those acres, with conservation
in mind. Subdivisions may not seem like the height of conservation,
but this is not an ordinary subdivision. Each of the prospective
homes will be custom-designed and built out of local resources
and manufactured materials from the land where soda bottles
become coats.
Working
with a land-use planning group in Saratoga, Phinney
and Laskey identified features of the site they wanted to
preserve and found ways to develop homes while trying to “protect
the rural character of the land, protect open space, protect
existing ecosystems and minimize (the house’s) footprint
on the land,” says Laskey. “By doing that we
design a house that fits the site and respects the site – which
is probably the most important part – as opposed to
the conventional way of doing a subdivision which is, you
take
your 95 acres, cut it up, see how many houses you can get.”
They’ve
set aside 35 acres of land as “forever
wild,” and
are building trails for hiking and horseback riding through
the property so it can connect to county forest land bordering
it
on two sides. Initially the acreage preserved would have
been 70, but zoning rules regarding communal septic systems
did not
make this possible. In that plan there would have also
been a cluster development with smaller lots around a common
green
where
a versatile barn like community building would have stood.
They hope to be able to do more community-oriented development
on
projects in the future, pending zoning changes that will
accommodate them.
Construction
can produce enormous waste and accounts for 30 percent of raw
materials used in America,
according
to the Green Building
Council. Our buildings also use 65 percent of the electricity
and 12 percent of the drinkable water that are consumed.
But through creative thinking and environmentally-friendly
products,
those numbers can improve.
“Part
of building green is building houses that are durable, long-lasting,
low-maintenance and energy-efficient,” Laskey
says.
In
their building endeavors, Laskey and Phinney try to use materials
and paints that are either nontoxic
or
have very
low amounts
of volatile organic compounds. For instance, instead
of plywood treated with formaldehyde, they use one
without it. “Typically
the formaldehyde and other building materials out-gas
for five years,” says Laskey. That’s
what people pick up when taking a whiff of “new
house smell”.
They
also use a vast amount of recycled products ranging from Styrofoam
to cement
metal to newspaper.
Using
recycled and long-lasting
products means a lower-maintenance house, which
saves the homeowner money and means less building material
will end
up in landfills.
Furthermore, many of these products can be recycled.
The
exterior of the demonstration house will be almost all recycled
materials; finger-jointed wood
trim
and window frames,
clapboards
made of wood-look-alike fiber-cement board, and
metal roofing and window sashes. These materials
are also
surprisingly durable. The clapboard has a 50
year warranty and is
guaranteed
to hold
paint for 25 years. All told, Laskey says, because
of these features the house “far surpasses
the standards for normal construction.”
All
of these recycled building materials get Laskey
and Phinney pretty excited. Laskey’s
interested in using an insulation made of soybeans – they
currently use one made of recycled newspaper – and
Phinney is looking at the countertop material
made from pressed paper that’s a bit
like Corion, minus the epoxies.
Phinney’s
creative juices really get flowing when he
can use local materials, such as timber and
stone, especially
if
they’re from on-site. (He built one house
out of “pin-straight
pine” that was on the property that they
milled and dried on site.) “Those are
the opportunities I get most excited about
because then the buildings speak of the environment
that
they come directly from,” he says. In
the case of the subdivision, they will be using
timber (which is never old-growth) from Canada
and New York, some from as close as 30 miles
away, and some stone
from a quarry near lakes Champlain and George.
Using local materials helps the local economy
and cuts down on fuel consumption: Their
supplies are coming from within a 500-mile
radius.
A
home’s embodies energy-efficiency
is a priority from the early drafting phases. They place the
home’s longest side on the east-west axis and put most
the glass facing south to maximize light. They also “build
with large overhangs that are 2-feet deep, which protects the
glass from the summer sun, but in the winter when the sun is
lower it allows the sun to come in,” Laskey says. Their
designs use an open floor plan that helps create a thermal
chimney in the house for air flow. This lets excess moisture
and heat
cycle out, and in warm weather will reduce the need for air
conditioning to a few times a year. There is also a special
ventilation system,
costing about $1.50 per day, which cycles fresh air through
the house continually.
The
demonstration home will feature a boiler with 94.2 percent
efficiency, far above the standard. As a result, heating
and electricity costs are about half that of the average standard
house of the same size. Their demonstration house, at 3700
square feet, is estimated to $1600 per year for heat and
electricity.
For
water efficiency, the new homes will feature various indigenous
flora that don’t require much watering,
and big lawns are discouraged. They’re also looking
at a water system which can cut consumption by 52 percent.
The
demonstration house will also have smart-home technology
courtesy of Ambiance Systems in Clifton Park. By touching
a screen, a homeowner can control the lighting, temperature,
security and
entertainment. It also flickers the lights at a rate
imperceptible to the eye but which doubles the lifespan of
light bulbs.
Home-owners can, at the push of a button, lower the heat
and lights upon
leaving the house and call from a distance to turn the
heat on if they’ve away. The whole system costs
between $25,000-$50,000, but is more about lifestyle,
to Laskey,
than relatively short-term
pay-off.
The
demonstration house is being built in part with grants from
the American Lung Association and the
National Association
of
Home Builders Research Center. It is one of five projects
chosen by the NAHBRC to demonstrate green building
practices, and as
a result of that grant the builders will hold a workshop
at eh demonstration house in October to help people
learn about the
methods they employed. They are the only builders in
the Northeast chosen by ALA to build a “healthy
house, a designation they earned from their concentration
on using nontoxics and a smart ventilation system.
The
somewhat painful part of green building is the price.
At the low end, Louden Ridge homes will be selling
for
around $500,000; at the high end,
the demonstration
house has a price tag of just under $1 million, but that’s
because it’s
got all of the bells and whistles and nice 5-acre lot.
“When we talk to people about green and about sustainability, people really
tend to get lost because it’s another language,” Laskey
notes, “I
tend to talk more about durability and low-maintenance and energy-efficiency,
everyone understands that.” And they also understand that
budgeting can affect how green a buyer can be. |
