Never was there a tale of more woe than that of Maria and her Tony. Broadway’s West Side Story travels south to the John Paul Jones Arena for one night only. Revel in the Bernstein and Sondheim score, the knife fights, and the love story as the Jets and the Sharks spar on the streets of New York in a musical that remains relevant after five decades.
Thursday 5/9 $35-55, 7:30pm. John Paul Jones Arena. (888) 575-8497.
The day starts normally. You get into the office and grab a water from the fridge. Before closing the door, you notice that Lisa has (once again) brought Lunchables. You curse her under your breath because you’re envious of the vacuum-sealed deli meat treat (accompanied by Capri Sun). As you walk to your desk, you make a mental note to talk about Lisa behind her back. Once you’re settled in, you do some work. After 11 minutes you’ve earned a break. You direct your browser to Facebook and notice that you’ve been invited to an event. That’s when the panic sets in.
The Facebook event invite is a complex thing. For some, it’s no big deal. Others, like myself, inject a great deal of emotion into the process. I wasn’t always like this. Before moving to Charlottesville a year ago, my wife and I lived in Brooklyn for seven years. I disregarded invites with the best of them.
However, living in C’ville has changed the way I treat the digital invitations. I have to. I run into someone I know about once every 17 seconds. There they are! Being nice! This means I must be nice, too. And so I now take the Facebook invite seriously. If I reply that I’m not going or simply ignore the invite altogether, I’ll see that person the next day and yes, they’ll say “hi” and smile because people are friendly here. But rightfully so, they’ll judge me later.
Now you’re probably thinking, “This guy has too much time on his hands, but he sure is handsome” and maybe “What do my Facebook replies say about me?” This week’s list will help.
What Your Facebook Event Invite Reply and Subsequent Action Says About You:
A going reply, and you attend. Congrats. You’re a great person. Your friends can depend on you. You’re basically the best. You’re 1984 Ralph Macchio.
A going reply, and you don’t attend. You’re unreliable and people aren’t sure what to make of you. You own Maroon 5’s acoustic album and voted for George W. Bush. Twice.
A maybe reply, and you attend. You’re honest. You deal with life as it comes, and aren’t afraid to say exactly how you feel. You’ve visited the Grand Canyon, but weren’t that impressed with it.
A maybe reply, and you don’t attend. You sometimes struggle with commitments and often stretch yourself too thin. You miss going to Blockbuster.
A no reply, and you don’t attend. You’re an introvert and feel overwhelmed by crowds. You tell people you liked “The Wonder Years” even though you didn’t.
A no reply, and you attend. You’re an easy person to get along with, but slightly mysterious. If you murdered someone, your friend would tell NBC29 that the charges “sound about right.”
You ignore the invite. You frustrate people. You wear True Religion jeans.
The name and the lineup have changed since the band currently known as Culture first began laying down tracks with Joe Gibbs in 1977. But the group remains one of the most authentic and enduring acts in the history of roots reggae. Its extensive back catalogue, comprised of nearly 50 studio, dub, and compilation records, is filled with jamming songs of defiance, social consciousness, faith, love, and the story of Jamaica. Though the group’s raw-edged lead vocalist Joseph Hill passed on in 2006, his son, Kenyatta “Culture” Hill, assures listeners that the groove, the mission, and the hits will continue. 18-plus.
Wednesday 5/8 $10, 8pm. Main Street Annex, 219 Water St. E. Downtown Mall. 817-2400.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZV_3Ff0QPQ
When 50 members of the Public Housing Association of Residents and their supporters marched up the Downtown Mall last week to protest recent efforts by the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority (CRHA) and its director, Constance Dunn, to raise rents and make it easier for the agency to evict those who don’t pay, Janelle Parrish was near the front of the crowd. Forced out of her Westhaven apartment with her six school-age kids the week before, Parrish toted a sign that carried extra emotional weight: “EVICT CONNIE DUNN.”
The Parrish family’s story has galvanized PHAR in part because it’s heart-wrenching. A family of seven is crammed into two hotel rooms, paid for by friends, churches, and strangers. The oldest son, a 19-year-old senior at the Henry Avenue Learning Center, is just weeks away from graduation.
But there’s more to it than that. The Parrish eviction is the first since the release of a report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) last month that called out the CRHA for a number of institutional failings: not training staff properly and not updating its tenant policy, but also charging residents too little, being too lenient with evictions, and, more broadly, not realistically planning for a future with less federal financial support.
Part of the CRHA’s response to the report was a new Admission and Continued Occupancy Policy (ACOP) that proposed raising the minimum rent from $25 to $50, rolling back the monthly late-rent date, and increasing late fees from $10 to $15, among other changes.
Dunn, who took over as CRHA director just over a year ago, had been pushing for some of those changes since she arrived. But PHAR activists said the new rules were an unfair crackdown, and on April 24, just before the new ACOP was about to go before the CRHA Board of Commissioners, the Parrish family’s highly public eviction gave PHAR a rallying point, and they’ve been pushing back—hard.
Last Thursday afternoon, Janelle Parrish sat at a desk in the Westhaven Clinic, a neat stack of apartment listings in front of her. Her family had been homeless for eight nights, and the money PHAR raised to put them up at the Red Roof Inn was set to run out in a few days. The kids were taking things pretty hard.
“They hurt, but you gotta make the best out of it,” she said. “We’re still together, still a family.”
As she flipped through the listings, she told her story. In April 2012, she got hired as a cook at The Boar’s Head. Joy Johnson, vice-chair of PHAR and CRHA Commissioner, told her at the time she had to report the new job to the CRHA. Rent is 30 percent of residents’ income, so a pay increase means a mandatory readjustment.
“And that was my intention, to report it,” Parrish said. But long hours made it difficult to find time to meet with her property manager—and she kept forgetting.
In February, she got a letter from the CRHA that said her rent had jumped from $100 to $729, and that she owed $5,822 in back rent. March 8 court records show a judge granted CRHA possession of her apartment. There was no appeal.
But Parrish said she was told she could stay as long as she got caught up by turning over her sizable pending tax return to the CRHA. There was also the question of HUD’s earned income disallowance program, which lets public housing residents adjust to paying a rent increase over four years. Parrish said her Legal Aid Justice Center lawyer was talking to Dunn, trying to apply the disallowance retroactively.
Then came the eviction notice. When friends and PHAR members learned she was about to lose her home, they launched a last-ditch effort to grant her an extension until her kids finished school the following week.
A chief architect of the push was 26-year-old high school teacher and City Council candidate Wes Bellamy. Four of Parrish’s kids are in his youth mentoring program, and he’s gotten to know the family well in the last year and a half. The night before the move-out date, he called CRHA Board Chair and Mayor Satyendra Huja, Board member Hosea Mitchell, and his fellow campaigning Democrat, City Councilor Kristin Szakos. Their inquiries and e-mails kicked up a storm of concern over the eviction. Huja initially offered to help pay her rent if it would keep the family in their home longer. City Schools Superintendent Rosa Atkins paid Parrish a visit. But in the end, the family had to pack up and move out.
“There was a breakdown in the process,” Bellamy said, echoing the sentiment of many PHAR members. Parrish erred in not reporting her income, he said, but the CRHA should be doing everything in its power to keep people who can pay rent in their homes. “To just throw them on the street without there being some communication—that has to change,” he said.
Dunn had a different take. CRHA waited more than a month to evict Parrish, she said, but in that time, “she made no effort to retain her housing or communicate with me at all.” Other lease compliance issues surfaced. Dunn didn’t elaborate, beyond saying that “some were very serious.”
Ultimately, Dunn said she had no choice. “My responsibility is to be consistent with the application of rules and regulations without regard towho might call the news media selectively on only some of those residents,” she said.
She also pointed out that evictions have dropped significantly in recent years. “CRHA evicted 23 families in 2011, and I do not think there were protests,” she said. There have been just two evictions in 2012, she said. Only the Parrishes’ got any attention.
The implication is that PHAR’s storm of protest was opportunistic. And maybe it did move the needle. In the wake of the high profile departure of the Parrish family from Westhaven, the CRHA Board voted to adopt a version of the ACOP that scrapped the minimum rent hike, the increased late fees, and other proposed tougher regulations.
“The Board felt that there was little or no value from a financial perspective” in applying the new rules, Hosea Mitchell said last week. “The additional funds it would raise were minimal and would only burden residents even more.”
PHAR hasn’t let up. At last week’s protest, organizers underscored the need for residents to keep pressure on the CRHA to back down from another item in the ACOP: a policy that would allow the agency to “select applicants to deconcentrate poverty levels.” The PHAR members passing around the megaphone outside City Hall called it gentrification. The marchers, Parrish among them, showed their displeasure by signing their names to a piece of posterboard and, chanting, filed into a basement hallway to hand-deliver it to Dunn.
She wasn’t there, but she’d already expressed her feelings on PHAR’s public displays of anger. The residents weren’t trying to work with the CRHA, she said earlier that week via e-mail, “or they would have some respect for the Housing Authority’s obligations.”
For the past 14 years, Light House Studio has offered filmmaking workshops for local students, providing a hands-on education that rivals many college-level programs.
I was a student at Light House in its first class during the summer of 1999, and was crowded into a studio space in the basement of The Jefferson Theater with seven other students and four or five instructors during the very loose, informal beginnings of the program. Our topics were not assigned, rather we were paired into buddy groups, assigned a mentor, and told to go out and shoot whatever we wanted.
A lot has changed in the world of video since then. Digital cameras are everywhere
and A/V editing software is easier to find and use than ever. Teenagers making their own media is a commonplace trend, rather than an infrequent occurrence.
Light House has grown as well, and now offers a wide variety of classes year-round, each on a different aspect or genre of filmmaking. When I returned last year to teach a film history class, I was astonished at how knowledgeable and accomplished the students were. The Internet has given them access to decades of cult classics, and their projects were more ambitious than anything a young person could have made in the ’90s.
“We run into kids now that make their own movies by themselves and don’t even know about us,” said program director Jason Robinson. “The main thing that we offer—more so than the equipment—is the opportunity to be around people who are making stuff. Your work is stronger if you’re with people doing similar stuff.”
Light House runs programs year-round, and is busiest in summer when students have more time for immersive classes. The upcoming 2013 summer schedule includes a total of 13 day camps and advance workshops, many of which are already filling up. “This is our most packed summer ever, in terms of the things we’re offering,” Robinson said. “We’ll have something going on every day from 9am-3pm, sometimes two things in the classroom at once, in addition to groups going out into the community.”
“When you take a class here, it’s a three to one ratio of students to teachers,” explained development coordinator Lucy Edwards. “You’re working in small groups with adults who are professional filmmakers and who are dedicated to your group.”
The classes during the school year include Keep it Reel, Light House’s longest-running program which focuses on outreach in the community. Currently, students from the Westhaven Community Center are working on a documentary about the controversial topic of nearby restaurants that refuse to deliver to the Westhaven neighborhood.
“We just got a grant to do a doc on a local food hub,” Robinson said. “Rather than put it on our site and make it a class, we did it as a project with the Renaissance School during the school day. The kids who were interested went out and shot on a farm, and at the distribution center. They interviewed people, it was a crash course in filmmaking. But it’s also educational—the farmers there are all from the International Rescue Center, from Bhutan. They’re really neat guys.”
“That’s how we run a lot of our programs,” Edwards said. “We’re able to offer classes at a discount, or sometimes for free, because of those grants.”
Light House has also been active in sending out the students’ completed films for entries in festivals around the country. “One of the music videos we made last year has just won a ton of awards,” said Robinson. “We were really flabbergasted. The students were 13- to14-year-old girls and they made a video for an unreleased Sarah White song called ‘Last Day of May.’ Billy Hunt was their mentor on that, and it’s gotten into the L.A. Film Festival, NFFTY in Seattle, the Pendragwn Youth Film Festival in Seattle, and the Virginia Student Film Festival.”
“We have a lot more that we’re pushing,” Edwards said. “It ebbs and flows. Traditionally we have at least one or two films that will win a whole bunch of awards, and this year we have five or so films that have been honored as finalists or award-winners at film festivals. There are even a couple of festivals that have a whole Light House block.”
“A lot of our students stay in touch, and a lot of the really active ones go to film school, all over the country,” Robinson said. “We have students who are graduating now from VCU, SUNY-Purchase, Columbia, and Chicago. They go to cool places. A bunch of them just got accepted to Emerson. We do keep in touch, and a lot of the students end up coming back later to mentor.”
“The workshops at Lighthouse are taught by knowledgeable professionals in film, making it easy to get past a lot of the early rookie mistakes beginners can make. It’s all around an incredibly effective learning environment,” said Greg Nachmanovitch, a sophomore at Charlottesville High School, who first got involved in Light House through a summer animation workshop. “The flexibility and possibilities of the medium fascinated me,” he said. “And after that I knew I wanted to pursue film for the rest of my life.”
Watch the award-winning video for Sarah White’s Last Day of May here.
Sunday night, I watched a documentary called “Mariachi High,” which follows the fortunes of the mariachi ensemble at Zapata High School in a sleepy Rio Grande border town in Texas. The film is, more than anything else, about how a music teacher with a passion for tradition has created a reason for high school kids from a rural Mexican-American community with a high dropout rate to pour their hearts into something, and, in the process, learn to love school.
This week’s feature follows the cast and production team of Albemarle High School’s spring musical, Hello, Dolly! and reminds us how important the hours after the last bell can be. When everyone who is dying to get the hell out of there is gone, the kids who stay open up like night-blooming flowers. Cliques melt away, ages don’t matter, and being cool becomes about pleasing the adults who cared enough to stick around and teach you something they know how to do well. In the process, they open you up to a world that’s not just for kids. As AHS Theater Director Fay Cunningham says in the story, “We don’t do high school theater.”
Cunningham, I understand, has built a juggernaut of a drama program that routinely cranks out $30,000 productions from a base budget of $500 per year. Down the road at Monticello High School, Theater Director Madeline Michel is trying to build the same kind of tradition at a school that’s only 15 years old. Her kids—white, black, and Latino—are about to stage In the Heights, a play about race and identity in the mixed up part of Manhattan called Washington Heights, which was an old Jewish neighborhood that bordered on the heart of Harlem and slowly, and then not so slowly, turned Dominican. I lived there for two years just out of college. The fish market was Korean.
Race and gentrification are important news themes in Charlottesville, not because, as in NYC, they are imminent forces that will change our landscape the way a hurricane changes the beach, but because our small affluent city has the chance to deal with them better. To make music from the mashup. ¿Ya comprende?
Chef Harrison Keevil of Brookville Restaurant will create a farm-fresh meal at Bellair Farm Sunday, May 26. Blenheim Vineyards will handle the wine. Tickets are $65 ($10 for children under 9). Call The Happy Cook at 977-2665 to secure yours.
You’ll get a second chance to try that meal (though slightly altered) on Sunday, June 9, at Timbercreek Organics. Same deets.
On Tuesday, May 7, Bill Curtis will serve Sherwood Farms’ beef brisket along with six red wines and a Sauternes, all from Bordeaux. It starts at 7pm, costs $50 for wine club members. Call 293-3663 to make reservations.
Popeyes on Emmet Street (sandwiched between KFC and Raising Cane’s) is now open.
Ditto El Puerto, on the Downtown Mall next to Salon Druknya. Rumor has it Guadalajara may have some competition.
Coming soon: Sedona Taphouse in the former Millmont Grille spot. This is its second location and it boasts over 500 craft beers; fresh, organic, or even local ingredients; and a commitment to supporting its community. Every Monday is the “$5 Steak Out for Charity”—get an 8 oz. Angus steak over red mashed potatoes for $5. The restaurant’s Facebook page says to expect an early June opening. Our mouths are already watering.
Bang! has updated its $6 Wednesday night menu for warmer weather. Among the highlights: tuna sashimi with mango spoons, goat cheese dumplings with cilantro sauce, and mozzarella-stuffed jalapeños wrapped in bacon.
The second floor of Miller’s is getting an overhaul. Expect a full bar, TVs, and more seating areas to give it a sports bar feel. But don’t worry—there’ll still be smoking.
Berry Berry Frozen Yogurt has opened on the Corner next to Boylan Heights. Similar to Sweet Frog (et al.) in its setup, Berry Berry uses Greek froyo, which makes it creamier and tangier than regular yogurt. While you’re there, try some Bubble Tea: a Taiwanese beverage containing tea mixed with fruit or milk.
Another West Main treat, Pearl’s Bake Shoppe is now open, with freshly baked cupcakes ready by 10:30am and served until 6pm. The second shop of its kind (the first is in Richmond), Pearl’s has earned top marks from Richmond.com, Virginia Living, and Richmond Magazine.
When the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors voted last week to push ahead with a plan to spend $11.8 million to turn an old building supply warehouse into the new home of the Northside Library, it added to a growing list of capital projects planned in the county for the next five to 10 years.
A $37 million plan to relocate part of the county’s court system; a $1.1 million police firing range; the $2.1 million renovations to the Ivy Fire Station: While it might not constitute a building boom, exactly, it does signal a return to infrastructure investment some say is long overdue.
“It’s absolutely going up, and by necessity,” said Supervisor Ann Mallek. “There’s a huge majority in this county who say one of our biggest faults is that we let the growth come, and then 20 years later we deal with it.”
The size of the county’s five-year Capital Improvement Plan (CIP)—adopted or amended on a yearly basis and meant to be a long-term estimate of building and maintenance needs—contracted significantly after fiscal year 2010, shrinking from $138.8 million to just under $60 million. But that number has been creeping up. The CIP for FY 2014, which the Board voted to implement earlier this month, is north of $107 million.
Republican Supervisor Ken Boyd, a consistent pro-development voter during his tenure on the Board, said the earlier slowdown was a necessary side effect of a seriously ill economy.
“We decided to draw back a little, and I don’t think we’re worse off for it,” he said. “I disagree with that concept that we should spend money we don’t have just because it’s a good deal.”
Mallek said that kind of thinking has held the county back in recent years when it should have been planning for the future. “The reason we haven’t gotten anywhere is that there are a few people who only vote the short message,” she said. “That’s irresponsible. These are things it’s stupid to ignore.”
She said the county should have been steering more tax revenue to capital projects during the recession, making down payments on new projects at a time when it was cheaper than ever to borrow money.
“Other cities went for it, because they knew it was going to save them in the long run,” she said. “We were just too short-sighted, because all we were looking at was the tax rate.”
In that view, the Democrat has a somewhat unusual ally: Neil Williamson, president and executive director of the Free Enterprise Forum, a pro-business nonprofit that tracks local government policy.
Williamson said projects can’t be “Taj Mahals,” and he takes issue with what he thinks were unnecessary overages in the Crozet Library construction. But in general, he said, the county has to recognize that capital spending is a core function of government, and that foot-dragging on much-needed projects and failing to build capital expenditures into the budget only adds to costs in the long run.
“Quite frankly, the county has failed to spend the monies necessary for infrastructure in order to keep up with current conditions,” he said. “It’s a good sign that we’re starting to see an uptick in capital spending, but we’re not caught up. We’re behind the eight ball.”
It’s two days before opening night, and the Albemarle High School Players are taking a rare breather. Larry Johnson, a retired math teacher who’s been building sets at AHS since the current cast of Hello, Dolly! was in elementary school, is seated in a chair near the edge of the stage. Clad in an orange UVA t-shirt and khaki trousers, Johnson looks out at a rapt audience of 50 teenagers and begins the “magic speech,” which he delivers every year at this time.
“This is no ordinary place, no ordinary wood that you walk on,” he tells them. “It’s a place that contains magic. If I’d just seen it, I might not believe it, but I’ve experienced it…And I now understand that when a role takes you over, when you become who you portray, all of a sudden a play is not a play, which is the magic of this stage.”
You could see it as just another corny pep talk, but if you’re there, listening to Johnson and watching the students, your skin tingles.
I hadn’t been to a high school musical since Jimmy Carter was president, but in the spring of 2011 I found myself in the Albemarle High School auditorium for a Sunday matinee of Phantom of the Opera.
“Wow,” I thought when the curtain calls concluded. “That was amazing.”
Turns out I wasn’t the only one impressed by a bunch of adolescent thespians and their director. That summer, readers of this newspaper voted Phantom their favorite local play in Best of C-VILLE. The following year, the Albemarle Players earned another Best of C-VILLE award, this time for Fiddler on the Roof. When I heard the troupe was putting up Hello, Dolly!—one of my all-time favorite musicals—I told my editor I wanted to write about it—from auditions to opening night.
So I was back in the AHS auditorium in January, this time surrounded by several dozen students who’d stayed after school for an audition workshop. I was about to introduce myself to one of them when conversation abruptly ceased, and all eyes turned to a side door in the front of the auditorium. Fay Cunningham, the longtime head of the drama department, had arrived. I met Cunningham for the first time a couple weeks earlier on a dreary morning when I cut out of work to watch her Drama IV students perform their final exam, a scene from Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, which Hello, Dolly! is based on. Then, now, and during the months to come, I often heard Cunningham before I saw her, thanks to her laugh—an extended squeal of delight, followed by a bark-like “ha!”
Just over 5′ tall with rectangular glasses, and a tangle of strawberry-blonde hair, Cunningham is savvy in the way of someone who’s spent decades working with—and not taking crap from—young people. She’s fond of long skirts and scarves, and favors bright colors—pinks and greens in particular. After introducing herself to me that first morning, Cunningham apologized because she’d mixed up her dates. The exam was yesterday, she said, but “come back next Monday afternoon when my Drama II students are performing.” It wasn’t a request.
“Fay is fierce,” one parent told me when I mentioned last winter that I was writing this story. I wasn’t sure what he meant by “fierce,” but after four months watching Cunningham tirelessly and generously interact with teenage singers, dancers, and actors, as well as other teachers and parents, I now know he meant that it takes a certain tenacity to turn a high school production into something spectacular. Or, as Cunningham put it: “We don’t do high school theater here. We aim for professional theater.”
Before telling the students gathered for the workshop what they’d be in for when Hello, Dolly! auditions began the following week, Cunningham explained that the show opened January 16, 1964 at the St. James Theater in New York with Carol Channing in the role of Dolly. It earned 10 Tony Awards, including best musical.
While Cunningham talked, I studied the kids: Which one of you is Dolly, I wondered as I looked over the girls, who outnumbered the boys by about two to one. What about Irene Malloy? Who is a Horace Vandergelder, played by Walter Matthau in the 1969 film version, which starred Barbra Streisand as Dolly? Mostly, though, I was curious to see if they were talented enough to turn back the clock to 1890s Yonkers, New York, and make me believe them when they shouted lines like “Holy cabooses!” or sang “It only, takes a moment, to be loved a whole life long…”
“It all starts next week, ladies and gentlemen,” Cunningham said. “The role you get depends on how you act, sing, and dance, and how you work as a group.” By the end of audition week, “I’ll know who the whiners are and who will hang in there. If you want it—and you’re thirsty for it and hungry for it—you’ll be here, performing for 700 or 800 people. But you gotta work for it.”
And then Cunningham turned the floor over to Jennifer Morris, the AHS Players’ vocal director for 21 years. Sometimes the good cop to Cunningham’s bad cop, JMo, as her students affectionately call her, told the kids that “before you utter a word of the script we’ll get a chance to know your singing voices—we will hear what kind of voice you have, how loud, how confidently you sing, what your range is. Wanting a role in a musical, and having the capability to sing that role don’t always go together.”
Added Cunningham: “You have to understand that what you might want, or how you perceive yourself, isn’t always the best thing for that part. The chemistry of the actors or the blend of the voices may not be right. I don’t pay attention if someone’s fat or thin or young or old. A few years ago, I cast a black-haired, Puerto Rican girl as Annie. I didn’t dye her hair red or put a wig on her. We played her for who she was. There is room for everyone in this show.”
After decades spent living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Don and Minna Doyle found themselves facing catastrophe when Hurricane Katrina flooded their house with 12′ of water in 2005. “It was structurally sound, but everything had to be replaced,” Minna remembered.
While many of their neighbors threw everything away, the Doyles were more inclined to salvage what they could. “I sat for months and months and cleaned things,” she said. “Don rewired the lamps.”
Within months, they had decided to relocate to the Charlottesville area, where they have family. As they looked for a piece of property where they could build a house, that same urge to conserve drove their search. The big appeal of the two-acre Ruckersville plot where they settled was its suitability for passive-solar construction.
“We selected it for the exposure,” Don said. Along the property’s southern edge, sunlight pours into the glass lining the 14′ rear wall of their house, which was completed last July.
The Doyles’ choice of architect—Schuyler-based Fred Oesch—also reflects their environmental concern. Oesch is known for sustainability-minded homes, and his design for the Doyles maximizes energy efficiency. Largely, that’s achieved through passive means: the shape of the house, its orientation, and simple material choices (like the concrete slab that lies under the floor, soaking up heat during winter days).
“The bottom line, the price per square foot, is about the same as conventional construction,” said Oesch.
Free energy
Even before approaching Oesch, the Doyles came across an idea in a magazine for what would become the basic form of their new three-bedroom home: a shallow V, with its point facing south. Oesch readily adopted the scheme, adding a key element—the entire roof slopes up from north to south, creating tall walls that face the sun.
“Pretty much every room in the house gets sun during the day,” he explained. Deep eaves protect the house from summer sun, but in winter the sun’s lower angle means that light and heat are welcomed in. “There are no moving parts; it’s just a natural way of doing it,” Oesch said.
During their first winter in the house, the Doyles observed that their radiant floor heat, powered by solar-heated water, is only in demand a few hours a day. “On sunny days, it gets up to 73 degrees,” said Don. With the concrete slab holding the sun’s heat and slowly radiating it back into the space, “the heat won’t come on again until 4:30am, and it’s off by 10:30am.”
The Doyles also have a pellet woodstove and geothermal heat as backup sources. Meanwhile, in summer, the house is mainly cooled through a passive chimney effect, which draws cool air in through north-facing windows and exhausts through skylights and high windows under the eaves. A mini-split system supplements when needed. Oesch said the mini-split avoids the need for ductwork, “which I try not to do because it’s unhealthy—you can’t clean it inside—and ugly.”
To give the house a tight envelope, Oesch chose structural insulated panels (SIPs) for walls and roof. “We also paid some attention to low-maintenance,” he said. “There’s a metal roof, so rainwater catchment would be easy to add. The fiber-cement siding is virtually maintenance-free.”
Getting the look
The Doyles’ previous houses had been contemporary in style, and they wanted a home that would suit their collection of 1960s-era Scandinavian furniture (much of which they had painstakingly rescued from Katrina’s floodwaters). “I like contemporary, but it has to be a little bit soft,” said Minna.
The design ultimately feels “clean but not ultra-modern, not stark and cold,” said Oesch. Plenty of wood—hickory floors and pine ceilings with exposed beams—warms up the space visually, and high southern windows in repeated sets of three, along with French doors, merge the indoor and outdoor spaces.
“Everyone today likes the very open concept,” Minna said. “I’m glad I don’t have it.” While the dining and living areas are essentially one space, the kitchen is fairly separate and has its own integrated sitting area. “This is just open enough,” she said.
The kitchen’s custom cherry cabinets do, however, continue into the dining room, and openings in the wall between the two spaces make a further visual connection (and boost energy-efficiency, too).
A freestanding flue, with the woodstove facing the living room, stands near the front door and creates a de facto entryway, so that guests don’t walk right into the living spaces.
One of the Doyles’ favorite spots is the sunroom, which extends south from what Oesch calls the “prow” of the house (i.e. the point of the V). Lined with windows, it offers a sense of intimacy with whatever the weather is doing outside.
“Looking at the slope, and the nice greenery, is so relaxing,” said Don. Having survived Katrina, he and Minna seem to have found a refuge at last.