Tradition and Technology for Health and Sustainability
Our good friends at Fireclay Tile are running a Backsplash Competition and whose kitchen are they using to show what a beautiful kitchen can be? Naturally our last kitchen from 1566 Sanchez St! This beautiful recycled material tile really makes the space special – we use their Debris Series tile in every kitchen we build.
We’re just happy that Fireclay Tile loves us as much as we love them!
This year, the annual Greenbuild Expo was held, conveniently, in San Francisco, affording me the opportunity to visit a wide variety of product vendors to see what progress is being made in Green windows, tile, heating, solar, landscaping, water conservation, and lighting. After traversing multiple show floors and hundreds of thousands of square feet of booths and products, just one product stood out in mind as the best in show.
Juno Lighting, one of the major manufacturers of recessed lighting fixtures, was showing a product that I’d been talking about and hoping for ever since I started doing Green building. I’ve been installing LED recessed lighting since 2008, but while the lights dim much more smoothly than they used to and while you can get a color of LED light that approximates a warm white (about 2700 degrees K), the problem remained that when you dim LED lights, the color stays the same – they just get more dim.
This is quite different from traditional incandescent lights that become more red and orange as they dim making for a “warmer” mood in a dimmed space.
Finally, though, a maker of LED lighting has created an LED recessed lighting fixture that creates light that becomes more warm as you dim it down (by incorporating LEDs with different color temperatures that are brought into play as the light intensity is dimmed down. The Juno product has been christened WarmDim. I tried it out at the Expo and it looked pretty darned good. I won’t get a chance to try one out in a project home until later in 2013, but I’ll keep you posted!
After months of paperwork and correspondence, the USGBC finally accepted all of our documentation and inspections and agreed that 1566 Sanchez had achieved all of the necessary LEED points to be certified as LEED Platinum. eco+historical couldn’t be more pleased to have built the first home in Noe Valley to reach LEED Platinum and one of less than 10 single family homes in San Francisco to reach that plateau.
But we didn’t do it alone. We want to thank our builder, Chris Begg of CBC General Contractors for executing to our plans even when so many of the components we chose were new to the market and unfamiliar; Paul and Rich of Nowak Heating and Air Conditioning for fitting in a difficult mini-split air source heat pump, and many others.
Why do we do this? Why do we go so far to make these homes as green as they can be?
Not for the money, surprisingly. It certainly does appeal to buyers to have a Green home, but the top factors for buyers are still location, number of bedrooms and baths, layout, aesthetics…and then, somewhere down the line…sustainability and eco qualities.
Still, eco+historical is committed to building this way because it’s the right thing to do.
The homes are more healthy for the families that live there.
The homes use less energy and less water and absorb more runoff and waste water and thus have a smaller ecological impact.
As energy and water costs go up over time, the benefits of the efficiency of homes like 1566 Sanchez will only increase.
So at the end of the day, eco+historical will do fine, but the thing that makes us most happy is that the homes we build will serve their families and their communities long into the future.
While they say that you can’t time markets (and they’re right), we accidentally stumbled into the right timing for this one. Although we’d planned to have 1566 Sanchez ready for sale by December 2011, various niggling details held us up until March 2012…right as San Francisco real estate went into a frenzy.
The response to 1566 Sanchez was incredible – we received so many gracious and generous compliments and comments…thank you to everyone who had a chance to come by and check it out.
4 days after the first showing, it was sold.
Now our focus is shifting to 1436 Sanchez, just up the street.
Once again we’ll shoot for LEED Platinum and once again we hope to transform a small Victorian into something that’s large enough to work for a contemporary family, but stick to the general footprint of the original and retain the original facade.
Well, as usual, I let an inordinate amount of time pass since my last post.
It’s been a busy few months.
We wrapped up construction of 1566 Sanchez in mid-March of this year and we’re pretty darned happy with how it turned out. The wide-plank engineered oak floors were finished with Tung Oil to seal out stains and they look amazing and the white interior carries light to every corner of the home.
Todd Adams of Ken Fulk Design led the way in designing the staging of the home and it came out absolutely gorgeous – we can’t thank them enough.
Take a look…
In putting together any eco-project, you always have an enormous number of design choices to make. Whether it’s the light fixtures, the style of trim, or the plumbing fixtures, you have to look through dozens, hundreds or even thousands of choices to see what fits your taste, your budget, and energy or water efficiency goals.
For our projects, that means that we want, as much as possible, to select bath fixtures that adhere to the EPA’s WaterSense Certification program. This program rates toilets, faucets and shower heads that meet the specified WaterSense water efficiency goals. Currently, that means that toilets must use 1.28 gallons per flush or less, faucets must run at 1.5 gallons per minute or less and shower heads must run at 2.0 gallons per minute or less.
As with all innovative products, the marketplace starts off with few options for the leading-edge adopters (eg. eco+historical homes back in 2008/2009) but as more and more localities set water efficiency goals into their local building codes, the number of available products grows exponentially. The earlier you are as an adopter (like those folks today trying to find 1.75 gal/min shower heads), the more meager your options and…unfortunately…the less likely you’ll be able to find a style of fixture that matches your design sensibilities or themes.
Thanks to this broadening range of products, there are now plenty of fixtures that are both stylish and much more efficient than standard fixtures (where toilets typically use 1.6 gal/min, faucets use 2.5 gal/min, and shower heads can use a whopping 10-12 gal/min).
In particular, the gorgeous faucets from Delacora are both classic and high style while offering the efficiency that an eco home demands.
On our Master Bath Vanity, these looked simply amazing, combined with the Caesarstone Misty Carrera counter and backsplash and re-sawn oak vanity and mirror.
In the shower, we tapped Kohler for their Bancroft classic shower set – now running at a WaterSense-rated 2 gal/min. The polished nickel finish accentuates the sense of tradition and warmth.
Rounding out the bath choices was the very traditionally-styled, yet up-to-date-engineered Kohler Devonshire toilet. Quiet, efficient at just 1.28 gal/flush, and perfect for our decor, it fit our design and our LEED criteria.
You hear about them all the time now. LED lights. Energy efficient. Cool burning. 10X lifetime of an incandescent light. 1/10th the energy of an incandescent light. Pricey…but prices are coming down and the shelves of every Lowes, Home Depot and Ace Hardware store are stacked full of LED options now.
Some LED lamps are designed with screw-in bases to directly replace your incandescent or compact fluorescent bulbs. There are dozens if not hundreds of options like this – from manufacturers as large as Philips and as small as EarthLED or Pharox.
Unfortunately, if you’re in California, the state’s energy code, Title 24, doesn’t allow you to use these super-efficient bulbs in a regular screw-in socket if you’re required to put in “High Efficacy” (very efficient) lighting – such as the state requires for kitchens and bathrooms. In those situations, you can use a non-screw-in base fixture that accepts Compact Fluorescent bulbs, or you can seek out fixtures that build-in the LED lamps.
For our project at 1566 Sanchez, we elected to do the latter, incorporating Halo 4″ LED recessed lights as the primary light source in the kitchen. These fixtures can be ordered with different color temperatures, from Warm White at 2700 degrees Kelvin to a more blue Daylight White at 4000 degrees Kelvin. Call me a softee, but I like warm environments, so we elected to use the 2700K dimmable downlights.
In these fixtures, there’s no bulb. it’s an LED light engine tucked into a housing and trimmed out like a traditional recessed downlight. That little orangey-yellow square below is the LED light source.
The challenge with LEDs, however, (aside from initial price concerns that some may have), is that the load that they put on a dimmer – basically the amount of energy they draw – is so much lower than incandescent lamps that sometimes using a dimmer results in the LED light either not working, flickering at low light levels, or sometimes not fully turning off. The net net is that many dimmers just weren’t designed to handle such a low load. Sadly, as of March 2012, this includes pretty much every electronic multi-way or motion-sensing dimmer.
Even worse, most lighting manufacturers haven’t done comprehensive testing to tell you which dimmers will work with their LED lights and most dimmer manufacturers haven’t done the testing to know what lights will work with their dimmers!
The good news is that as LEDs become more mainstream, this testing is starting to happen. Perhaps the best informational chart we’ve seen comes from Philips – who tested their medium-base and GU10 bulbs with numerous dimmers from the leading manufacturers.
This is what we need from all of the lighting manufacturers until we can start counting on any dimmer working with any light the way we now do with incandescent lights.
We talked in the last post about how we re-used the old concrete patio by breaking it into pieces and building into the new garden’s dry-stack wall…finding treasure in what would once be considered construction waste.
…and we talked about how we saved the old rafter beams from recycling by ripping them down and using them to face the new roof deck’s planters…
…and we also mentioned that we saved the old chimney brick (which wasn’t seismically sound nor needed anymore in our era of metal flues) to use for the lightwell patio…
But what we didn’t really talk about was some silverware that we saved from somewhere else.
Browsing one of our favorite websites, etsy, a source for handmade and usually one-of-a-kind items from creative folks the world over, we came across a designer who makes custom light fixtures from old silverware. While this has been done before, Jessica Johnson‘s work was particularly attractive, so we reached out to her to make a special piece for our breakfast nook at 1566 Sanchez.
In keeping with the rest of the hardware in the house, we asked Jesse to use polished nickel hardware and cloth-covered traditional lamp wiring plus we said how large it should be to fit the space we were targeting. After that, she decided everything and delivered this absolutely cute and beautiful chandelier that just says “come on over…this is where you eat!”
While having a great home as a nest is one of the greater forms of comfort in our lives, I’ve always believed that having a connection to nature leaves us more grounded. Some of this connection can come by living near parks or heading out to hiking trails, but the best is having one’s own home connect the inside world and outside world together, providing constant reminders of life all around us.
To accomplish that at 1566 Sanchez, we knew that the back yard would be amazing – very light and open, but just in need of some great landscape design, a few trees, and a great patio to connect the home to the garden and allow for outdoor entertaining and dining.
After looking at the work of dozens of landscape architects around the Bay Area, we finally stumbled upon Scott Lewis of Scott Lewis Landscape Architecture. While trying to find a landscape architect who understood how to deal with San Francisco’s narrow and sloping lots, we came across Scott’s gorgeous Parkside Garden in a list of awards by the American Society of Landscape Architects.
The subtlety of the mix of plants and trees and their connection to the home made it feel like that home was situated in an Arboretum or Botanical Garden and didn’t suffer from having a dozens of competing colors but rather more a blend of textures with a few complementary colors. Very peaceful. Very soothing. Something you’d want to sit and look at for hours as the breezes play with the trees.
So Scott Lewis it was. And what a great choice. Scott is easy to work with, creative, and responsive.
Given that we were doing so much excavation, we had to get the trees for the back yard early in the construction process so that we could get them in the back yard without requiring the use of a crane to carry them over the house since once the house was all walled-in, there’d be no way to get a 36″ box Olive tree through there!
Our biggest challenge in the home, however, was the upstairs front bedroom. It was going to have a large front deck since the top story is set back 12′ from the front of the house, but the deck was behind the original Victorian parapet wall…nearly 7′ tall and eliminating most any view other than that of the spires of St. Paul’s. Here’s how it looked just after framing – definitely at risk of feeling like it’s an alleyway.
Even after putting on siding and the cool roof waterproof membrane, it had the feeling of a box.
But, working with Scott, we came up with a space that made it feel like a private garden, gave it some enhanced views from a raised deck, and incorporated the home’s original roof joists as facing material for planter boxes…making it both green and Green.
The original roof’s 120+ year-old wood had some serious character!
So these were ripped down and re-used to make…wait for it…these:
Which look alright until you plant them and get…
We designed the tops of the planters to be low enough to sit on and the warm wood of the original roof beams gives it a cozy feel. For the patio surface, we found a beautiful porcelain tile from Ceramica Atlas Concorde at a great local stone and tile dealer – Spec Stones. The tile is pretty Green itself, saving us from using real stone and including a high percentage of recycled content while looking just like stone.
And from inside the bedroom, you get more of a garden view – something that will look even more amazing once the red-leafed Japanese maple leafs out in the Spring.
Up on the raised deck area, there’s a lovely seating area with a view of the bay where one could imagine sipping their morning coffee.
That’s no alleyway.
The other area where we were concerned was the little stair lightwell outside the rear bedroom on the ground floor. Below grade some 10′ to 12′, it could have been very dark and dismal. To counteract that, we made the patio out of brick from the homes’ original chimney and built a planter using aromatic cedar and planting it with shade-tolerant plants and a lovely and large Japanese maple.
And planted it makes this a retreat, not a basement bedroom…
While up the stairs, the largest garden area provides for indoor-outdoor living, siting a 36″ box fruitless Olive tree in the middle of the patio and offering a border of red and green Japanese maples with drought-tolerant turf and wild grasses creating a space for kids and dogs.
We used separately poured concrete pavers to lay out a patio and softened it with pebbles in between, with the Olive tree centrally-located so that there would be a rich green view right outside the Family Room.
While here you can really see the dry stack wall we made by breaking up the old (and ugly) concrete patio and giving it a new and much more attractive life. Again, we used pebbles on the landings of the steps to soften the setting.
Thanks, Scott.
Platinum, actually.
While we certainly want to have a house that’s well insulated and try to do things right, the ultimate approval of our insulation came during our LEED pre-drywall inspection last November by Sharon Block of Bright Green Strategies. Walking the house and verifying that the insulation was properly cut and fit to every stud and joist bay, Sharon was impressed with our batt installation and gave 1566 Sanchez a passing grade, leaving us on track for our LEED Platinum rating.
Now on to sheetrock and making the home feel like a home instead of construction site!
