FEED THE GREEN MACHINE

GREEN DESIGN AT THE FLORIDA HOUSE IN SARASOTA IS PATHING THE WAY FOR THE FUTURE.

By Judy Stark

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Drought-tolerant plants sprout in the garden. From the front deck to the com-post heap, from the master bath to the laundry room, the materials are natural, recycled, energy-effi cient, environmen-tally sensitive.

This is the Florida House, a light-fi lled, airy, Cracker-style home that grew out of a desire to show positive solutions to en-vironmental problems. It resides on the campus of Sarasota County Technical Institute, where it was built by students and volunteers. The home is not for sale; it is open to all as a place to learn about living comfortably without burdening the environment.“This isn’t about `what you should do,’ said John Lambie, president of the Flori-da House Foundation, shaking his fi nger.

“It’s about `what you might do.’ The idea is to speak to the market about what’s available off the shelf that might fi t your lifestyle today.”

That’s the point, really: That living in harmony with the environment and de-creasing the load on dwindling resources doesn’t have to mean living lives of de-privation. The house includes air condi-

tioning and a dishwasher (one that uses 4 gallons of water per load, not the 10 to 14 most dishwashers require). The house has two bedrooms, a den, two baths, a great room and kitchen in 1,500 square feet of living space, plus an additional 823 square feet of space on two screened porches.

The house uses off-the-shelf products and methods, many of them new to the market. The porch tile, for example, is made of 60 percent recycled automobile windshield glass (the rest is clay fi ller). The wood decking is Trex, manufac-tured in Tampa by Mobil Chemical of recycled plastic bags and wood chips. The walkways are made of porous con-crete that doesn’t hold water and allows as much rain as possible to percolate through to the soil below.

The house is sided with TimberStrand, a manufactured wood product made from “junk trees” such as aspen or pop-lar, which are traditionally not used for home construction.“We had it before the manufacturer’s rep knew it existed,” said Thomas A. Gilmore of Lemon Bay Builders in

Here’s a different sort of “model home” - one that uses earth-friendly materials and techniques to create a house uniquely designed for southwest Florida. Big screened porches let breezes sweep through the house. Overhangs shade the windows. A metal roof refl ects the sun’s heat.By Judy Stark

Englewood, the contractor of record. TimberStrand uses 8-year-old trees that otherwise would be discarded, he said, rather than valuable 40-year-old trees. The trees are chipped and formed, with a bonding agent under pressure, into boards that are straight and true and won’t warp, Gilmore said.

Builders keep building the same sorts of houses they always have, Lambie says, because that’s what they know how to build and that’s what they know will sell. Buyers have no idea what else might be available. Now, builders and buyers can come to the Florida House and see en-ergy-effi cient and environmentally con-scious techniques and methods in place. They can talk to the people who built the house. They can broaden their no-tion of what’s out there. The hope is that the Florida House will provide “one-stop shopping” for builders and buyers.

It’s a place where the know-how is available and accessible, Lambie said:

“The idea is not that we know, but that you know.”

Already, one Sarasota County builder is specifying as standard the Florida House’s landscaping at the homes he’s building in a new subdivision. The Home Builders Association of Sarasota

County voted to recommend the Florida House’s yard to its members as a method of landscaping.

That’s what the house’s supporters hope will happen: “When we can get builders and developers to start speci-fying these things, we’ll have the battle won,” said Michael J. Holsinger, a horti-culturist and county extension director. He helped coordinate the project and helped design the gardens.

The house faces south, and there are few windows on the east and west sides, to avoid too much sun. High windows allow light but not heat and glare. Those are among the techniques that Lambie calls “no-brainer stuff we’ve been doing for years. Neat stuff, huh?”

A cupola, rising from the kitchen/great room, gives hot air somewhere to rise, and it’s dispersed out transom windows that can remain open all winter. Those windows are sheltered from rain by roof overhangs. In the attic is a radiant barri-er and insulation to keep the house cool.

Every room has transoms to encour-age natural air fl ow, and there’s a whole-house fan to cool the home.

Toilets are low-fl ow. Water is heated to 160 degrees in a 40-gallon solar col-lector on the roof and a 40-gallon tank in the garage. In the bathrooms, when you turn on the hot water, the cold water standing in the hot-water lines is drawn off into a tank under the sinks instead of simply running down the drain. That brings hot water to the tap immediately, and the diverted cold water is later used to fl ush the toilets.

The house is furnished with natural fi bers and fi nishes. The carpeting in the master bedroom is made of 100 per-cent recycled plastic bottles, which does not absorb stains, odors or humidity. Throughout the house, fi nishes contain no volatile organic chemicals, to which some people are sensitive; water-based urethanes were used instead. Spaces for recycling bins are built in.

Besides the showers in each of the bathrooms, there’s an outdoor shower, shielded from view by a fence outside the master bedroom. That permits residents to shower without fi lling up the house with steam and moisture.

Outside, all the plants are native and require little water. They’re mulched with recycled materials from the county landfi ll. Seven irrigation systems draw

Walk through the house and note these features:

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The green building boom has players in the commercial sector racing to outdo one another with cutting edge environmen-tal features. Architecture and design fi rms, construction and development, hospitality, and other service providers have learned that boasting an awareness of sustainable building practices is critical to marketability. The residential sector, however, has lagged behind in developing exemplary models for green homes – perhaps partially as a result of being a late recipient of the incentive of LEED standards, which were initially applicable exclusively to commercial buildings. But if incentive was the missing link, home builders have it now, and just one company has gotten the platinum stamp.

Living Homes aims to revolutionize the homebuilding mar-ket. We mentioned them when the design was just an early concept, and later when the prototype was under construc-tion. Now the model home is complete and ready to defend its rank as the greenest home on earth.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Steve Glenn, the venture breaks more than a few molds. You could call it a big zero – a building that yields zero impact on all dimensions: water, energy, etc. I would say that it is a harbinger of things to come in the residential real estate market.

First, its product is a prefab home, a unit whose parts are manufactured via a mass assembly process and snapped together almost like legos at the construction site. This is far more effi cient than new manufacture: construction-related detritus constitutes 40 percent of the waste in landfi lls. Its modular nature also facilitates the process of adding rooms and living space with little to no waste so that the home can adjust to the changing needs of its owners without sacrifi cing its sustainable nature.

Don’t be fooled by the term ‘prefab.’ This isn’t one of those shoeboxes you might see riding down the highway on the back of a fl atbed truck. Living Homes’ fi rst unit – es-sentially a demo product that Glenn himself lives in – was designed by pioneering architect Ray Kappe. The aesthetic is breathtaking, something that you might expect to grace the cover of Dwell Magazine rather than the catalog of a typical homebuilder.

Despite the design and effi ciency of Living Homes, it’s most notable for an unrelenting commitment to sustainability. The 4BR/3BA 2480 sq ft Kappe home was the fi rst residence in the country to receive LEED for Homes platinum, the high-

est level of certifi cation from the United States Green Building Council. Not bad for their very fi rst product out of the gate.

Living Homes applies this sustainability ethos to almost every aspect of the home. The company exhibits its dizzying array of green features in a slick Flash media tour (complete with voiceover narration by CEO and chief homeowner Glenn) on their site. Some notable elements:

* A greywater system that reclaims nearly all water used in the home and drives a complex predictive irrigation system that uses moisture controls and Internet-based weather telemetry to minimize the amount of water used on the drought tolerant plants that decorate the landscaping;

* A Photovoltaic system mounted on a McDonough-style living roof that provides 75 percent of the power needs of the home, plus provides shade so you sit back and can admire the nifty rooftop garden of your favorite fruits and vegetables

* An environmental monitoring system that constantly measures household water and electricity usage, en-abling a real-time environmental scorecard.

As we green our lives, the home is a natural place for in-novation. There will be lots of players in this space, but Living Homes has set the bar with its extraordinary product. Never-theless, the home has received its share of criticism, largely for it luxurious, high-end package, which knocks affordability off the list of features to boast about. The expense irks critics for two reasons: One, the original mid-20th century prefabs were fundamentally about affordability and access to the average consumer, so for prefab purists, Living Homes betrays the founding mission. Perhaps more importantly, though, many sustainable building devotees believe that affordability is an indispensable element of being truly “green.” In other words, if you are pricing out a huge segment of the market, you’re not really sustainable. Both of these arguments are debat-able, to be sure, and at Worldchanging we often justify pricey green design by reminding people that most innovative prod-ucts hit the market at a price-point well outside most people’s budget, and eventually demand drives down cost.

Hopefully this will be the case for Living Homes, because surely the rest of their sustainability agenda is a model to be replicated widely in residential housing. And no doubt every-one deserves to live in a home this green.

LIVING HOMES: THE GREENEST OF THEM ALL

water from one of two 2,500-gallon cis-terns. They, in turn, hold rainwater that has drained from the roof. The laundry and sinks will drain their “gray water” to irrigate the banana patch. think about the edibility aspect of the landscape and how you can get a re-

turn.” If you’re going to put in all that work on your landscape, he said, “have it put something on your plate.” The

“growth” faction had squared off against the “no growth” faction, and the debate was divisive.

That was when some residents began

to seek ways to “solve the problems in a constructive way,.What does that solve?” Holsinger said. He was seated on the shaded back veranda on a recent sunny day when temperatures were in the low 80s, but a contstant breeze kept the place cool and inviting.

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resources:

GREEN MODELING: CHANGING THE WORLD ONE ROOM AT A TIMEby David Johnston and Kim Master (New Society Publishers, 2004)If you want to bore down into the underlying principles of green build-ing and really know that you’re making the right choices in your remodel, Johnston and Master’s book is an essential resource. There are the normal to-do lists and tips here, but you’ll also fi nd a depth of carefully explained research into why certain decisions are greener than others. You don’t need this book to replace the fl ooring in your kitchen, but if you’re trying to truly green your home, you’ll probably fi nd yourself dog-earing pages and under-lining passages... and learning a lot along the way.

“The energy that buildings require starts accumulating long before the buildings and homes are even in existence. The energy required to extract, transport, manufacture, and then re-transport materials to the point of use required a substantial amount of energy at a signifi cant cost to the environ-ment. The sum of all the energy required by all the materials and services (including the costs of upkeep and maintenance) to go into constructing a building is called the embodied energy. For example, stones excavated from a nearby hillside for a new patio have lower embodied energy than stones that must be transported from another state.”

The decision was made to build the Florida House to offer practical, real-world solutions to the problems the region was facing. “It’s not just about

building a house,” said Lambie, a for-mer solar contractor who once worked

with Buckminster Fuller, “but a place to talk about water, sewage, transporta-tion, economic development, to give the community a place to invent itself from the bottom up and talk about building community. That’s what’s so juicy here.”

Hundreds of people helped create the house, he said, and “that collaborative effort is really the most powerful part of the whole thing.”

The house is a joint venture of the non-

profi t Florida House Foundation and the county Cooperative Extension Service. The Southwest Florida Water Manage-ment District, Swiftmud, is a co-sponsor, along with Sarasota County Techni-cal Institute, which provided the site. Swiftmud gave a grant of $80,000 that was matched by donations from Florida Power and Light, the Sarasota-based Selby Foundation, the National Estuary Program and Home Depot. Volunteer la-bor and donated materials went into the house, for which ground was broken in September 1992.

The house uses about 50 percent less electricity than today’s homes and about 40 to 60 percent less water. It is hooked up to a computer monitor at the Florida Solar Energy Center in Cape Canaveral to track its energy use.As an example of the low energy us-

age of the home’s appliances, Holsinger cited this incident: The energy center called one recent day when their moni-tors showed no energy consumption, and they worried that someone had forgotten to plug in the refrigerator.

The house could be duplicated for 125,000 to 135,000 dollars, Holsinger estimated. But because the monthly op-erating costs are lower for a house built with these energy-saving techniques, he said, buyers might be less likely to de-fault, and the attractive appearance of a home like this one should give it good resale value.

That water-effi cient dishwasher, how-ever, costs $1,000 and is manufactured by KitchenAid only for its European market. The porch tile, the wood deck-ing and the siding cost 20 to 25 percent more than conventional building prod-ucts, Holsinger said, and he acknowl-edged that the TimberStrand siding is virtually impossible to come by because so little is being produced and most of it is spoken for. Still, these appliances and materials are out there, and, given enough consumer demand, might be-come more affordable and available.

The Florida House Foundation is seeking donors for a second house, to be built nearby, that will embody higher-tech methods and materials. Among its features will be a fl at roof where solar

The idea for the Florida House was born in 1990, when Sarasota was facing stiff water restrictions and a possible building moratorium.

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devices will be demonstrated. For most homeowners, what happens on their roof is a mystery, Lambie said, and he wants visitors to be able to see this off limits area.

At the grand opening of the Florida House, Sarasota County received one of 12 Technology Achievement Awards given nationwide by Public Technologies Inc. of Washington. The judges felt the Florida House was “an effective way of showing citizens and contractors how en-ergy effi ciency pays off,” said Theodore Shogry, vice president of the organization, the technology arm of a national associa-tion of local governments.

Florida House organizers hope the house can boost the area’s economy by decreasing dependence on “remote re-sources like foreign oil and water from afar,” Lambie said, and by using locally produced materials and products. It can also encourage environmentally sensi-tive and salable building and remodeling practices that create jobs.

THE HOUSE IS OPEN:

Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.Saturdays from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Group tours by appointment. There is no charge. Information: 359-5662 in Sarasota.

Participants in the construction of the Florida House are available to speak to community groups. Call the information number above.

Cork Paneling: This material is highly sustainable in that the bark of the Cork Oak can be harvested periodically to produce this material, without destroying the tree. The consistency is similar to linoleum.

Cork Paneling: This material is highly sustainable in that the bark of the Cork Oak can be harvested periodically to produce this material, without destroying the tree. The consistency is similar to linoleum.

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