When traveling in and around Portola Valley, there is no shortage of variations on the color green. Trees line the roads, native plants bloom in yards, and meadows and forests cover the open spaces. It’s no accident. Regulations and guidelines protect and encourage the town’s common green heritage.
The town is metaphorically green as well, and in recent years, the environmental emphasis has begun to focus on residents. In 2004, the town sent homeowners a conservation guide, a 28-page illustrated handbook that recommends, for example, ways to conserve air quality and creeks.
At about the same time, homeowners building new homes or major additions began having to complete a checklist of environmentally sound practices for the town’s architecture review board, noting which practices they planned to use. The list includes such ideas as reusing material from old buildings and managing storm water runoff.
But making checks on a list was easy, particularly when there was no follow-up by the review board. That Portola Valley tradition is about to end.
The Architectural & Site Control Commission is planning to extend its reach by engaging homeowners and their architects in extended conversations about green practices, said Planning Manager Leslie Lambert. The discussion will start early in the project and continue through the building-permit review and during construction, she said.
“An important message will be delivered to local architects, homeowners and builders,” said Ms. Lambert in a February 15 letter to the Town Council. “… The town is committed to sustainable development by promoting the use of green building products.”
Residential architect and Portola Valley resident John Richards already has that message. “I try to make all of my projects as green as I can,” he told the Almanac.
Asked why, he replied that the threat of global warming makes such designs “a moral necessity” if we want the planet to remain habitable. “There is interesting and really scary literature out there,” he adds, referring to Jared Diamond’s best-selling book “Collapse,” which attributes a society’s failure, in part, to how it chooses to respond to environmental problems.
Some Portola Valley homeowners are on a path to a smaller energy footprint, having taken steps that lower greenhouse gas emissions that might have otherwise been higher. With the help of the town’s planning staff, the Almanac sought out a few of these residents to find out what they are doing and why.
A living roof
The garage at the home of Tor and town historian Nancy Lund in Portola Valley’s Westridge neighborhood is less dusty these days. Complaints from Ms. Lund about dust generated by Mr. Lund’s woodworking equipment led him to have a separate workshop built.Mr. Lund says he wanted a shed, but under the influence of his architect and provisions in the town’s building rules, he settled for a 500-square-foot one-room shop.
The structure, begun in May and completed in October, cost more than he planned but, he says: “I am happy with what I got.” It’s got traditional insulation, wall framing and lighting, but includes several green building practices.
The earth itself helps to insulate the back wall, a retaining wall that sits against a hillside.
On the gabled sod roof is six inches of dirt stabilized by an embedded plastic grid and planted with grass and wildflower seeds. “That’s something I wanted for a long time,” Mr. Lund says of the roof, which is common in his native Norway. The roof’s old-country appearance is charming and also helps insulate, but “it comes with attached costs,” he says.
Indeed, the roof weighs 50 pounds per square foot versus 24 pounds for a tile roof, he says. An ordinary structure won’t support it. The center roof beam inside, which sits on steel posts at either end, is massive — 8 inches by 18 inches — as are the other rafters at 4 inches by 14 inches.
The weathered look of the redwood exterior of Mr. Lund’s shop belies its youth. The siding is old barn wood harvested by a local lumber recycler.
The floor and doors of the shop once echoed the sounds of cheers and basketballs. The boards in the door came from the ceiling of Encinal gym at Stanford University; his floor is from Encinal’s old basketball court.
Asked if his shop is the environmental statement it appears to be, Mr. Lund, 67 and a retired electrical engineer, says that wasn’t his motivation. “I wanted to re-use stuff and minimize new stuff as much as I could,” he says.
Is he an environmentalist? “I think we are environmentalists,” he says, to include Ms. Lund. “We are into recycling and the outdoors.”
Tapping the sun
Sometimes starting from the ground up with an energy efficient residential plan isn’t realistic. Ask Bill and Jean Lane, 49-year residents of the Westridge neighborhood. The house “is built, and it’s built out,” says Mr. Lane.They’re living in a house built decades ago in traditional ways, including the wiring. The wiring still is traditional inside the walls, but their electric meter has run backward since 2002 as their 10-kilowatt solar array pumps excess electrons to Pacific Gas & Electric.
“Jean and I felt very much into the environment and we decided to do it,” says Mr. Lane of the 100-foot by 30-foot array of solar panels banked on a hilltop field. “It’s fun to see the meter go backwards.” They get a refund from PG&E every month, he says.
The system costs about $76,000, but the Lanes received a rebate from the California Energy Commission for $34,400. Incentives from the state continue but per-kilowatt rebates are set to decline by 10 percent a year until they end in 2017.
Portola Valley does its part to encourage solar installations by having a permit fee of just $50, low when compared to the $490 average for Silicon Valley communities, according to a recent Sierra Club report.
Just above the Lane’s photovoltaic array is a smaller set of solar hot-water panels installed in 1962 to heat a swimming pool.
“We felt lucky to be able to do it,” says Ms. Lane, adding that she has noticed that the panels often continue to produce electricity on cloudy days. “We hope others will do this sort of thing.”
The system may also improve the property’s market value, says Mr. Lane. It is their good fortune, he notes, to have a location for the solar array where the sun isn’t blocked by trees and neighbors aren’t having their views disturbed by reflections from the panels. These issues tend to come up in more densely zoned neighborhoods.
Acceptance is growing
Another issue that, in the past, has demoralized residents is finding a builder or architect willing to take on a green home design.The Alpine Hills house of Jim and Patty White, designed by Portola Valley architect Carter Warr, uses a geothermal heat exchanger to pre-heat water by tapping into the 55-degree ambient underground temperature. On the roof is a 5-kilowatt solar array and the house is designed to use natural ventilation, making air conditioning unnecessary.
But when they were building their house in 2001, Mr. White says, they ran into problems locating anyone with experience in recycling used water — called gray water — on the site and in using recycled materials. It was hard enough to find the materials, but the builders would then question their durability, he says.
“We found that, as we were trying to do things that were not conventional, we ran into roadblocks,” he says, adding that the pool of experience may have grown since then.
It has changed, but gray-water management is still a tough nut, says Mr. Warr. His firm, Portola Valley-based CJW Architecture, has talked about it for 10 years, he says. “It’s a great way to reduce the amount of wasted water,” he says, but contractors and landscaping professionals aren’t familiar with it yet.
“It takes some time … to broaden its acceptance,” he says.
The outlook is better for other green practices. “Nearly every project we’re doing incorporates some components of green design,” says Mr. Warr. Most include natural lighting and geothermal heating and cooling. Also common is the use of recycled materials, paints that emit fewer toxic gases, vegetation that needs less water, and buildings oriented so as to maximize use of the cyclic pattern of sunshine.
Government action could help acceptance of green principles, he says. U.S. plumbing codes, for example, require pipes to be vented through the roof, while international codes allow the capture of interior air, thereby cutting in half the amount of piping in a house. “We need to continue to push the towns to adjust ordinances to allow us to use less energy-intensive materials or less materials,” he says.
Mr. Warr’s advocacy of green design is no secret among his clients, he says. In designing a house, he searches for ways to lower energy usage, and that can include asking about habits in doing laundry and shopping for groceries.
“We talk about responsible development at almost every stage,” he says, including the size of the house: the larger the house, the more energy has been spent in making its materials.
House size “is probably the most difficult part,” he says. “Obviously, we’re working in a community where people have a lot of wants. It’s (an issue) that we, as individuals, deal with a lot. What do we need versus what do we want. … What’s extraordinary (about such conversations) is that our clients really appreciate it. Most of them say ‘Gosh, I never thought about that.'”
It helps, he says, that his clients tend to be working at the leading edge of technology. “They are people that who, every day, think out of the box,” says Mr. Warr. “It’s an exciting thing and we’re lucky that we live in an area where people are ecologically sensitive and ecologically interested. People say, ‘Gosh, this is the most responsible thing I can do.'”
Redwood City-based home builder Gary Lencioni told the Almanac he hasn’t been approached on a green-home project, and that he and his employees would need training in any case. Asked if he is interested in the subject, he replied: “Absolutely. It’s the wave of the future.”
INFORMATION
• San Mateo County RecycleWorks: Sign up for newsletter and find information on green building practices and sources. Go to recycleworks.org/greenbuilding or call 599-1433.• Green Resource Center: Ask-an-Expert hot line, green-home tours, contractor training, news and FAQs. Located at 1434 University Ave. in Berkeley. Go to builditgreen.org or call 888-404-7336.
• Whole House Building Supply & Salvage: Conducts home salvage sales; stockpiles salvaged goods for sale. Located at 1955 Pulgas Road in East Palo Alto. Go to driftwoodsalvage.com or call the warehouse at 328-8731 or 856-0634 to arrange for deconstruction.
