Friendly green monsters: Can a big custom home still be environmentally friendly? Friendly green monsters: Can a big custom home still be environmentally friendly? (September 22, 2004)

By Andrea Gemmet
Almanac Staff Writer

Jim Brady is a builder, but he spends much of his time as a tour guide, taking curious strangers around his tidy construction site.

A New Jersey resident who specializes in hurricane-proof structures, he is building a home for his son Scott's family on the corner of Oakdell Drive and Fanita Way in Menlo Park, and the unusual-looking work in progress draws about 10 people a day who want to take a look around, he says.

Dubbed "the icehouse" by neighbors, it's attracting attention because it looks so different from the typical house construction project. Instead of a wooden frame, big white blocks of recycled polystyrene -- from Styrofoam cups and other products -- serve as molds for the custom-blended concrete that makes up the walls and floors of the two-story structure. The polystyrene will remain in place to provide insulation, and eventually will be covered with shingles on the exterior and drywall in the interior, but at the moment it has a distinctly igloo-like appearance.

When it's finished, the house will be earthquake-proof, fire-proof, termite-proof, "practically bomb-proof," Mr. Brady says.

"This house isn't going to go anywhere. I pity the man who, in 100 years, wants to take this house down. He's going to need dynamite," he jokes.

He says his daughter-in-law asked him to find a way to build their house in an environmentally sensitive way.

"Our belief is that we could build a house that would be superior to a house built with traditional materials," says Scott Brady, his son. "It will be more comfortable, more energy efficient -- more green -- and we'll end up with a better house at the end of day."

Watching the process, he says he's become convinced that it's a better way to build, and that more and more builders will be adopting it.

"So far, everything we've used is recycled -- everything," Jim Brady says. "When we're finished, we might have 2 percent of new products here, primarily doors, windows and cabinets."

While the house won't include a solar energy system -- he's holding out for the evolution of better photoelectric cells, he says -- with its superior insulation and efficient radiant-heating system, the house will use 20 percent of the energy that a normal house would, Mr. Brady says.

That's got to be a good thing for a house with five bedrooms, five full baths and two half-baths that, including its full basement, will total about 7,200 square feet. It puts the house squarely in the midst of two big local trends in residential construction -- really big custom homes and an increasing use of "green" building practices.

Being green

"Green building" is a broad term that includes nontraditional building techniques, recycled and reused materials, energy-efficient fixtures and design, and sustainably harvested timber. Sometimes, a home's green pedigree is immediately apparent -- photovoltaic, or solar energy, panels on the roof, funky, plaster-covered straw-bale walls, and carefully located clerestory windows for natural lighting. Other times, it's not obvious at all that an otherwise ordinary-looking house has been carefully situated to make the most of light and heat from the winter sun, or that steel-frame construction and bamboo flooring were used in place of wood, or that the "slate" roof is actually a synthetic product made from recycled tires.

There's a big increase in interest in green building practices, says Jill Boone, green building program manager for the County of San Mateo RecycleWorks.

"My sense is, it's coming. A lot of people are interested, and those who aren't haven't heard about it yet," she says.

Exact numbers are hard to gauge, since information on green building techniques and programs are available not just through RecycleWorks but at every city's building permitting counter throughout the county. Thousands of copies of the county's new guidebook and checklist of 75 things people can do to make building projects greener have been distributed since its debut in February, she says. And it's been easy attracting people to events, like tours of local homes or the recent workshop on custom home building at Hidden Villa that was cheekily entitled "Size Matters."

"Larger homes consume way more resources -- not just materials, but energy and water, and (the consumption) is disproportionate to the number of people who live in them," Ms. Boone says. "It's a very sensitive issue politically, because nobody wants to be told they can't build a big home. We wanted to show what can be done to reduce the impact of this trend toward larger homes."

One way to do that is to install a renewable energy source in the houses, such as solar, or to use alternative framing techniques that use far less lumber, she says.

"You're minimizing the damage. If you put on a renewable energy source, then you actually mitigate it, because it's not getting drained off the energy grid, so the government doesn't have to build more infrastructure (to supply energy)," Ms. Boone says.

While the benefits to the community and the environment may drive owners of luxury home projects, there's also a great deal being done on the other end of the spectrum, the affordable housing market, she says. Green building projects are being driven by air quality and other health issues that are associated with the cheaper materials used in affordable housing, such as fumes from the formaldehyde in particleboard or gases that may be emitted from synthetic carpets, she says.

"There's probably not a lot of particleboard in a high-end home," says Ms. Boone. "Instead, you want to think about, where did you get the walnut used in the floors? Was it sustainably harvested, or was it old-growth?"

Eric Joustra, a Menlo Park architect whose home won the county's first green building award for residences, says the first green decision he made was not to tear down his 50-year-old home, but to keep it and remodel it.

"You're creating a 400-cubic-yard waste stream by demolishing -- we reduced that to 40 cubic yards (by remodeling). That's an incredibly green feature," Mr. Joustra says, adding that he salvaged and reused as much as he could during the project, and recycled everything from broken concrete to drywall scraps and packaging. And he didn't even start out intending to make it a green building project.

"There's a lot of misunderstanding about what green building is. People think it's using products that have some recycled content. That helps, but there is a lot of less-obvious stuff."

One of the things Mr. Brady points out at his remarkably tidy construction site is the lack of construction debris. Much of the lumber shoring up the molds for the walls has been reused, and once the concrete is poured, it can be reused again on other projects, he says.

All of the beams in the house are recycled and came from Whole House Building Supply in East Palo Alto. Instead of having dump trucks hauling away loads of junk after the house is done, he estimates that everything left on his site that can't be reused or recycled will fit in a pick-up truck.

Remodeling wasn't an option, because the existing house had been through six previous remodels, all of them bad and none of them matching, Mr. Brady says. Besides asbestos, it had different wiring systems, creating "a fire hazard waiting to happen," he says. He chose to demolish it rather than deconstruct, the environmentally preferable method, because there wasn't enough good material to save, although he salvaged what he could, he says.

The house is going to take a year to complete, about the same as a traditionally built home, and because of increasing lumber prices, the cost is about the same, Mr. Brady says. And it won't always look like an icehouse -- sketches show a traditional looking exterior covered in cedar shingles, though the shingles are made from new growth wood, fireproofed and mounted on recycled plywood.

"It's a big house, very big," says Scott Brady. "But we have a very good architect, and we were trying to build a house that will fit into the neighborhood. It will be completely unobtrusive."

He says he's hoping it will be done in the first half of 2005.

Until then, his father Jim says he's happy to play tour guide to anyone who comes around wanting to know more about it.

"My job is to educate," he says.

Design matters

Besides materials and construction practices, a flexible design is a key feature of green homes, Ms. Boone says.

"Our message is to build as small as you can and still have a home that works for you," she says. "Good design doesn't cost any more than bad design."

An innovative designer can create a home that minimizes the space needed, but can still be very functional and flexible.

"Sometimes, people build houses and don't think their needs will change, and when they do, it's easier to tear down the house. And unfortunately, there are some communities where that is often the case," she says, mentioning Atherton as a prime example.

Building techniques such as those employed by Mr. Brady and Mr. Joustra create homes where none of the interior walls are structural -- that is, they aren't holding up or reinforcing any part of the building. As a family's needs change, walls can be easily rearranged, added, or removed.

Good design also means a house that stays cool in the summer without air conditioning, which affects air quality and uses a tremendous amount of energy, says Ms. Boone.

"Houses don't need air conditioning in this climate. If the house is well-designed, there should be enough natural airflow and cooling that it's not necessary," she says. "Every home designer should be challenged to do it that way."

Mr. Joustra, who has worked on many projects overseas, especially in the Netherlands, says many green building innovations have originated in Europe, where people are used to having more limited resources and less space than Americans. But, despite its cultural identity as the land of plenty, the United States is closing the gap in the field of sustainable or green building practices, he says. He says he's seeing an increasing awareness and interest among his clients.

"People here are catching up," Mr. Joustra says. "Green building is becoming more fashionable."

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