So you want to build green, eh? You’ve come to the right year.
Five years ago—heck, two years ago—if you were searching for an architect to design your sustainable house, a builder to put it together, or a store to supply its fixtures and finishes, you would have had far fewer choices than in 2008. Across the homebuilding industry, people agree that the last several years in greater Charlottesville have seen a flowering of interest and expertise in more earth-friendly houses.
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“For an energy-efficient builder, this is the best time of my life,” says Al Stacey. The Winnipeg native began building homes in the ‘70s in his notoriously chilly hometown. In 1996, when he came to Nelson County and founded Gaia Homes, he discovered that what were standard building practices in Canada seemed high-performance—even unnecessary—to Virginians. “At that particular time, energy-efficient wasn’t on the ticket down here whatsoever,” he says. “The Sheetrock-encrusted vinyl palaces were the norm.” Greater initial costs for efficient houses (at that time, a 50 percent premium, in Stacey’s estimation) scared buyers away. With rising energy prices, though, it’s gotten easier for Stacey to convince clients that the investment will pay off.
UpStream Construction President Terry Herndon, who’s built locally since 1984, echoes Stacey when she says that building well has gone hand-in-hand with building green, since long before that term came into vogue. “We’ve always built way beyond code,” she says. “I’ve always done houses [where we considered] daylighting coming in, heat gain, passive solar…I grew up out in the country on a farm where you know the importance of trees and shading. It was just good old common sense that you don’t cut all your trees down.”
But lower heating and cooling bills are just part of the equation, and Herndon and Stacey both acknowledge that common sense has come a long way recently. One example: Within the last three years, Herndon says, the practice of conditioning crawlspaces and attics to avoid mold and moisture problems has gone from unusual to standard. “That was one of the dumbest things we’ve ever done—to seal up a house tight and leave it sitting on an unconditioned crawlspace,” she says. “Not one of our brighter moves as an industry.” When she first built a house with a conditioned crawlspace, the project was a puzzle to county code inspectors. Now it’s the norm.
Belvedere may look rough in its present form, but Kate White, Bret Harris and their two children are betting on its future. |
And there are a whole array of materials—from no-VOC paints to low-maintenance siding—that have become available recently, as consumers have gotten smarter about what to ask for and builders have lined up for seminars on how to meet that demand.
Bottom line? These days, “green” doesn’t necessarily mean “custom” anymore.
From the ground up
Nowhere is that more obvious than at Belvedere, the 675-unit development off Rio Road that broke ground 10 months ago in a new marriage between “green” and “production” building.
At the moment, if you visit the Belvedere site, you’ll probably stop first in a white tent near the entrance, where salespeople for Hauser Homes and Church Hill Homes—the two builders who have partnered with developer Stonehaus in the project—will talk to you about EarthCraft certifictions, shower you with marketing materials and offer you a small bottle of water with a Belvedere label. Renderings are propped on easels inside the tent—people relaxing at a café on a street bustling with pedestrians, kids playing soccer near an on-site organic farm and the Rivanna River. These images are hard to keep in mind once you’re out of the tent and driving the actual streets of Belvedere, empty avenues through a scraped red landscape.
Under construction by UpStream, the future home of Brian and Joan Day will also be a vehicle for education. |
Kate White, who along with her husband, Bret Harris, was Belvedere’s first homebuyer, is a naturalist and a healing arts practitioner. She’s the embodiment of what Stonehaus’ Chris Schooley calls the “pioneer”—the early buyer who helps define a community as it grows; she plans to start an after-school hiking program for Belvedere kids and even writes a blog called Home at Belvedere. “‘This is a little bit empty,’” she admits thinking sometimes, when she walks through the treeless expanse where she and her future neighbors will live.
“That’s the hardest part,” she acknowledges, “not having these feelings of older trees, older structures. But I have a lot of trust and a lot of faith. I think what Stonehaus is doing is right on.”
It’s significant that a person like White, who describes herself as a “nature educator” and blogs about examining raccoon scat on the Belvedere property, could be convinced to buy into the kind of neighborhood where homeowners choose between predetermined house styles from a printed list. That kind of thing has been associated with a cookie-cutter aesthetic and a consumerist lifestyle. In White’s case, the community-minded New Urbanist philosophy was the draw; for her husband, the EarthCraft-certified house sealed the deal. “He’s very attracted to the small house, energy-efficient, low footprint, easy to manage,” she says. “He thinks it’s very smart.”
Schooley is clearly delighted to have White in his corner, helping to attract more of what he terms the “diehards”—the ones who quiz him about the solar orientation of their future homes. But such folks may not be the majority of his buyers. Instead, he says, Belvedere will appeal to a mainstream homebuyer who’s interested in green building as just one of many factors—location being another biggie. “This is a production builder environment, which translates to value,” Schooley says. “We felt this was an opportunity to bring a green standard to people. This is real and accessible.” A townhome in Belvedere starts in the low $300s; single-family dwellings start in the low $400s.
Learning as you go
“It falls to us to educate,” says George Grundler, a Hauser Homes VP, speaking about that mainstream homebuyer who may wander into the Belvedere tent with no particular environmental interest. On the other side of town, Jason Coleman and Margot Morshuis-Coleman will tell you, sitting in their brand-new ThermaSteel house in Woolen Mills, about their own learning curve on green building. They weren’t driven by altruism when they began looking for an energy-efficient house in 2003. “It was not a high priority,” says Coleman. Rather, they were sick of paying to heat their drafty rental: “$400 a month, and we were cold,” he remembers.
 This ThermaSteel house is the first of its kind in Charlottesville, but now that it’s finished it seems to fit right in. Heating bills for the first two months of occupancy have averaged $35, says developer Roger Voisinet. |
As it turned out, the Piedmont Housing Alliance was putting up a cluster of houses in the Tenth and Page neighborhood that were not only energy-efficient, but included nontoxic and renewable materials, like bamboo flooring. The couple bought a lot and moved in, and energy costs “became a nonfactor,” Coleman says.
Four years later, as their two kids got larger and the PHA house seemed smaller, they contemplated another move. Any affection they’d once had for old houses, they say, had been outweighed by the experience of life in a new, efficient house. “You can’t go back,” Morshuis-Coleman says.
They looked at the Carter’s View development, a Church Hill Homes project on the south side of town, and noticed that green features were becoming part of the way new homes are sold (the Carter’s View website lists HardiPlank exteriors, for example). “They weren’t ideological about it,” Coleman says. “They’re just going along with an industry that’s changing.”
But Carter’s View wasn’t exactly to their taste. When they saw the ThermaSteel house that Roger Voisinet, a so-called EcoBroker with RE/MAX and a onetime solar-energy entrepreneur, had developed on spec at Chisholm Place, they felt more of a connection. Though it’s not a custom house—the no-VOC paint colors had already been chosen—there will be only one very similar house on their street, not dozens. (Voisinet plans to build a second ThermaSteel house next door.) “We wanted to live in town and not in a development; we wanted an established neighborhood,” says Morshuis-Coleman.
They moved in February and are reveling in their expansive backyard view and contemporary, human-scale kitchen. “For both of us, it’s almost how we would design it,” says Morshuis-Coleman. “Green building is often connected to good building,” adds Coleman, echoing Terry Herndon. “Someone put a lot of thought into [this house].”
On the edge
So mainstream homebuyers can sign on to a development that happens to be green—as with Belvedere—and energy-efficiency converts can find a spec house that meets their newly heightened standards—as with the Colemans. Meanwhile, custom builders like Herndon and Stacey are serving an ever-more-knowledgeable clientele. “[My wife] Joan and I have been attending home shows for a decade looking for [green] products,” says Brian Day. Herndon is building a new house in Crozet for the Days, designed by a LEED-certified architect and constructed with structural insulated panels (SIPs).
Both Days have worked in the environmental field for years; Brian currently directs the North American Association for Environmental Education. “We always wanted to build a very environmental home,” he says. “We are not at all your typical homebuyers.” The Days were hoping for a raft of green certifications—LEED, EarthCraft, EnergyStar and American Lung Association—and to use their home as an educational showcase. (They now expect to earn the first three of those certifications. Another Crozet resident, Artisan Construction president Doug Lowe, lives in one of the first LEED-certified houses in the country.)
“Just before we move in, we will have an educational event where we’ll have people walk through and we’ll explain everything we did different,” Day says—“dual-flush low water consumption toilets, low-flow faucets and showerheads. The wood in the walls is FSC-certified.” And he’ll point out simple things, like the 12" roof overhang that keeps rain from wearing out the windows as quickly.
Day says he’s learned a lot from Herndon’s accumulated expertise. And as a keenly interested buyer, he’s definitely noticed the quickening pace of change in terms of what consumers can access that makes their homes greener. “Think how easy it is to find a light bulb,” he says. “Now you can get compact fluorescent in a spotlight…I couldn’t find one of those six months ago. This weekend I found at Lowe’s a 52" EnergyStar fan for $45.”
It’s in this custom market that innovation is likely to continue, as it always has. Herndon, for example, says she’s been able to convince her building supply company to begin carrying more green products.
And alongside such incremental changes will come sweeping visions. Al Stacey rattles off a three-step master plan for the future of green building: “Right now we’re at the high-performance homes,” he says. “The next step where I’m going is the near-zero-energy home concept”—that is, a home that produces 70 percent of its own power using solar panels. “The next step would be a total-zero-energy home,” dependent on better and less expensive solar panels. “The next step beyond that is zero-carbon homes: zero-energy homes that export electricity,” providing all the energy a house uses and going on to sell power back to the grid, thereby offsetting the energy embedded in the lumber and other materials used to build the house.
Stacey thinks the zero-carbon home is about 15 years away. Likely further down the line is the time when large developments—the Belvederes of future decades—aim for zero-carbon building on a mass scale. In the meantime, buyers are the winners—whether they’re actively playing or not.
