Decoding the codes around green building

Image courtesy of Natural Balance Home Builders.

Just a quickie (that’s what she said) as I’m scooting out the door to go watch the Canucks game. Sorry about the decided lack of posts recently — down to just one a week for the third week in a row now — but it’s just been extra bananas with work lately.

I had a piece published in the At Home section of the Vancouver Sun today on a subject that I’m increasingly fascinated by — sustainable home design. Nick Kerchum and his business partner Galen Evans are trailblazers; they began work on the now-LEED Platinum certified Kerchum House in late 2006, when green building was hardly being considered by anyone. I thought the house was a good way to talk about all of the different certifications that exist around eco-design for homes, and it’s something I could have probably written reams more about.

Even though I tried to keep most of the verbosity down, it’s still a long-ish piece below, as I’ve reproduced it in full. If you’re interested in envirofriendly home tactics though, it’s worth going all the way through.

Photo credit: Glenn Baglo, PNG. Courtesy of the Vancouver Sun.

Nick Kerchum’s house definitely stands out from its Craftsman-style neighbours in the west side of Vancouver.

The sleek, contemporary residence has distinctive horizontal lines both inside and out, and a pronounced terracing effect from the roof overhangs; at certain junctures, it almost looks like cubes or blocks have been strategically stacked atop each other.

There’s more behind the design than simply a desire for style. Kerchum began planning the home in late 2006, with the goal of making it as environmentally friendly as possible. It’s the first LEED Platinum-rated home in Western Canada, and is also rated Built Green Platinum.

Those roof overhangs create cooling shade in the summer, and bring the sun’s warmth in during the winter. Oversized rectangular tiles of black basalt on the main floor absorb heat during the day, and release it into the evening. Both are aspects of passive solar design.

Solar tubes on the roof heat the hot water for the house, and four green roofs help manage stormwater run-off. Trellised apple trees and other food-bearing plants reduce the carbon footprint associated with filling the family pantry.

A number of these measures are becoming more and more commonplace as interest in sustainable design grows, but they were fairly unusual at the time when Kerchum began planning the home five years ago.

“I had a vision that this was something people would be very interested in,” he says. “I wanted to be an early innovator – it was so new, we even had certification issues, because the Canadian Green Building Council hadn’t even been set up yet. We registered through the U.S. one and switched halfway through.”

Kerchum was more motivated than most to persevere; he and boyhood friend Galen Evans were on course to set up their own green-focused construction company, Natural Balance Home Builders.

It took two years to complete, but the home has subsequently won a number of national building awards. It now serves as the ultimate show home to demonstrate a range of environmentally friendly construction methods, as the offices for the business are in the basement. Kerchum and his family live in the floors above.

Many eco-conscious buyers find it confusing to sort through all of the different rating systems that are out there. Different systems focus on different elements, says Evans, and there are varying amounts of time, effort, and expense involved.

“LEED has more categories, for instance, than Built Green,” explains Evans. “It’s a more accurate representation of a home’s impact on the environment, but there’s two to five times the paperwork involved, and a higher expense.”

Natural Balance works with sustainable building consulting firm E3 Eco Group. CEO Einar Halbig says the confusion is common.

“People are feeling a bit dumb; they don’t understand all of the acronyms – but no one understands it all! If you’re not in the building or design industry, why would you?” Here’s his quick definition list:

* LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. It was originally developed for commercial buildings, and then adapted to residential use. It’s a rating system that’s fairly well known across North America. Builders try to earn points in categories that cover the construction process as well as the ongoing use of the home. Depending on the number of points earned, a home can be designated LEED Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum, with Platinum being the highest level available.

* Built Green is a certification process used in B.C. and Alberta, administered by members of provincial home building associations. The checklists aren’t as complicated or long as those for LEED, say Kerchum and Evans.

* The property development arm at the University of British Columbia uses its own designation of REAP, or Residential Environmental Assessment Program. Simon Fraser University has its own development guidelines for on-campus projects.

* R2000 is a federal government standard that’s existed since the early 80s. It’s essentially a pass/fail system -you either meet the conditions for the standard or you don’t. It’s being reviewed, and the new program is expected to be much more aggressive about energy targets.

* EnerGuide numbers are straight math; they measure how much power a home uses. Every additional point means a boost in energy efficiency of three to five per cent.

Halbig says it’s a good baseline for consumers. The average older single family home probably has a rating of 66; LEED and Built Green both require a minimum of 72. The Kerchum house is rated at an astounding 88, which means it uses 60-70 per cent less energy than another home of the same size. It gets exponentially harder to get each additional point, as there is a finite level of efficiency.

Halbig says consumers also have to look at the construction process, and see how choices around materials, landscaping, and water usage are evaluated.

He recommends that anyone contemplating applying for a certification should first do an in-depth evaluation with a certified energy adviser.

“They can check where you can apply for incentives or rebates, and also where you can best spend your money. If you’re only experiencing a six-per-cent heat loss in your attic, it doesn’t make sense to spend 20 per cent of your budget on more insulation there.”

He also says bringing in a certified energy adviser during the design process of a new home can mean significant savings.

The stickiest question of all may be how much these ratings or certifications will ultimately mean for an increase in value for a home.

Halbig admits it’s a complicated question.

“Some of these investments require a long-term view. Look at your time frame -if you’re going to be in the home for less than five years, it may not pay off,” he says.

“But also project forward. What will energy costs be in 10, 20, or 30 years, and will buyers be willing to pay for a house that saves them money right now?” He also points that many other home improvements, like kitchen and bathroom renovations, don’t involve any return on the investment until the home is resold. However, improved energy efficiency has an immediate impact on the bottom line.

Kerchum, Evans and Halbig all agree that while it may take research and spending some money to meet environmental certification standards for home construction, it does pay off in better quality of life inside the home. While significant progress has been made in multi-family developments, the single-family home is one of the areas where the most work needs to be done.

The trio says it only makes sense to get the help of an expert in such a relatively new area, if only to navigate what a certification truly means.

House dreaming

The time has come. I think I’m ready to give up condo living and move into a house.

I bought my first place just before turning 24 (thanks for the hefty loan, Bank of Mom and Dad!), when the thought of a house seemed like way too much grown up responsibility, what with lawn mowing and shovelling and taking care of the gutters and what have you. I also wanted to be in the middle of the action of restaurants and nightlife.

Now I’m yearning for a little more space for B and me to stretch out — a library/music room would be amazing, and so would a proper pantry. The thought of house maintenance isn’t quite as scary as it once was, and I can still get to nightlife, as long as I build in some extra time to take transit/get a cab/find a parking space.

The dilemma now is how to proceed. Obviously budget is going to play a huge factor in where we end up, but it also determines what kind of condition the place will probably be in.

I’ve never done a reno in my life, but I’m kind of leaning toward finding a reasonably priced neighbourhood and building from the ground up. Thanks to the writing I do for the Vancouver Sun homes sections, I’ve been exposed to lots of amazing ideas about design, architecture, and sustainability.

I’m drawing particular inspiration from Gaetan Royer, an urban planner/architect/engineer, who built an amazing house in Port Moody that’s challenging a lot of our ideas about what sustainability means. The paper didn’t quite have enough room to print the entire piece, so I’m reproducing it below.

Also, the BUILDEX show — at which Gaetan will be speaking, profiling his home — begins today at the new Vancouver convention centre downtown. Check it out if you get the chance.

Warning: the story’s pretty long, so this post will be too. All of the images below are copyrighted, and published here courtesy of the Vancouver Sun/Ian Smith PNG.

Large south facing windows on this Port Moody home capture sunlight.

Taking sustainability home

By Claudia Kwan, Special to the Sun

No one ever takes building a new house lightly, but it’s doubtful many people put quite as much thought into it as Gaetan Royer did.

In 2007, he decided it was time to move his family from their large Port Moody condominium to a single family home in which they could live their philosophy of sustainability.

They needed a site with a south-facing slope for solar exposure, large enough to build the home they had in mind. During the course of the approximately year long hunt, they looked at a hundred different properties, until they finally found ‘the one.’

“We found the worst house in Port Moody,” says Royer, with a rueful smile. “It was a 700 square foot bungalow, and then one room developed a leak, so it became just 600 square feet.”

However, the 165’ x 65’ lot allowed them to live in the bungalow while construction was occurring on the new house. It also allowed them to do an extensive analysis on the specific aspects of the site.

“We got to learn and appreciate its specific characteristics, like the way the sun comes in, where the shade is,” he explains. “We did twelve different versions of the plan, and even made some changes during construction.”

Royer is better equipped than most to make decisions around building a home; he has an architecture degree, another in urban planning, and spent more than twenty years in the Canadian Air Force, in part as a military engineer.

He wanted to apply sustainability practices before and during construction, not just in the finished design of the home. It began with thinking about what to do with the dirt that would need to be dug up for the new house’s foundation to be built.

To limit how much material was taken offsite, Royer asked a neighbour if it would be possible to use her front yard as storage. They jokingly called the mound of soil that they heaped there during the course of construction ‘Mount Royer’. They were then able to re-use the soil when it came time to fill the site back in (and re-finished the neighbour’s yard as a thank you.)

“We probably saved eighty truckloads of dirt and gravel from being trucked on and off site,” Royer estimates. “It’s a waste of time, money, and energy.”

BC Hydro asked permission to take down a large tree on the property; Royer saved it for future use as stair treads, ceiling detail, and a table. His forward planning went right down to conserving materials that cost pennies, such as the plastic bags in which insulation is shipped.

He carefully saved the bags, and cut them open into large flat pieces. Later in the construction process, in place of buying rolls of plastic poly to keep things dry, he brought out the bags.

“It’s not just about the cost, even though every penny counts when you’re building a house,” he says. “It’s more a case of – these things are still usable, why are we just throwing them away?” He did the calculations, and estimates that his strategy with the plastic bags alone saved the equivalent of a barrel of oil.

The kitchen at the Royer home has a quiet ceiling fan and other sustainable features.

Royer and his wife Zoe, a design and management consultant, did extensive research in trade journals, architecture and interior design magazines, and online. The overarching goal was to have the most house with the lowest possible amount of material. The finished product, in a word, is lovely.

They decided against solar panels – not enough benefit for the expense – but did buy a condensing boiler, which spared them the expense of having heating ducts installed. They installed radiant heating in the polished concrete floors, which are incredibly durable and much cheaper than traditional flooring. They also decided against baseboards or moldings, opting for a cleaner, more modern look, which is lower maintenance.

Some of the elements installed in the home were more expensive than average, but Royer believes they will pay themselves off in reduced electricity use in five to seven years.

Small windows on the north side allow light through, but limit heat transfer.

The windows in the home are small and strategically placed on the north side, and expansive on the south side. There, they allow heat transfer to occur through the home, and for observers to drink in the view of the Burrard Inlet.

One of the most eyecatching features of the home is the green roof, through which rain pools into a pond at the front of the property. That water is triple-filtered, and then used for ‘gray’ (non-drinking) water. In the year that they’ve lived in the home, Royer says they’ve only had to fill the five hundred litre holding tank off the municipal water system once. There’s no cost savings involved, just the knowledge that they’re doing their part for conservation.

Royer also installed a 22 foot wide uninsulated concrete retaining wall on the north side of the home; it allows heat in during the winter and out during the summer. There, despite being the city manager for Port Moody, he encountered some resistance about conforming to existing building regulations.

“It’s not just the municipality, it’s the insurance industry and banks,” he says. “Anytime you try and do something a little different, the deck is stacked against you – they legislate for minimum standards, not for maximum effectiveness.” Royer believes it’s time to update the provincial building codes and allow for some flexibility, especially for sustainable homes.

Keith Sashaw, president of the Vancouver Regional Construction Association, argues that the industry has made significant progress with sustainability over the past five years, pointing to material salvage and recycling efforts. He also believes the building codes are starting to become more performance-based, rather than rigid requirements.

“The challenge with building codes is making it a balancing act between consumer protection and incorporating ideas around sustainability and affordability,” says Sashaw. “We have to meet the objectives without adding cost.”

Both he and Royer agree that builders need to incorporate sustainability into their practices if they want to meet growing consumer demand, and that it’s actually a competitive edge. The VRCA is currently working on a certification process for sustainable builders.

In the meantime, Royer acknowledges many others can’t, or won’t put as much research into building their homes as he did. That’s why he’s more than willing to share his knowledge either informally, in conversations with his neighbours, or in the seminar he will be conducting at BUILDEX on February 24^th at 1 pm.

“I’m open to the idea of helping others who want to learn about sustainable home building,” he says. “I’ve already been providing lots of free advice!”

Working on your fitness

Why have I impaled your brain with Fergaliciousness? Well, the insanely upbeat song might be part of the soundtrack this weekend, propelling me through an extended bout of decluttering.

I’ve been inspired to take on the task after writing an article about how to ease the burden of stuff that’s weighing you down (personally, I thought the headline should have been: “Irony.”)

During the course of the interview, I found myself nodding my head knowingly when organizers Heather Knittel and Susan Borax of Good Riddance Professional Organizing Solutions spoke of the CRUD that people commonly keep, and intrigued when they gave some strategies that will help tackle the problem.

Fergie means physical health when she sings about “working on my fitness” but Knittel and Borax mean another kind — your stuff has to have “fit-ness” too, as in if it doesn’t fit on your shelves, you have to deal with it.

I’m nowhere near Hoarders territory, but I do often find myself shuffling stuff around between rooms or from one floor to another. Then I delay cleaning because I haven’t cleaned up yet, and so the dust bunnies get bigger and bigger. I can’t find pieces of paper or other things that I need sometime, and I know that there are some things that I just never use at all that I should pass on to someone else.

So I’m going to practice what I preach (do what I write?) and see how much I can free myself from the weight of stuff. Wish me luck, would you?

Oh, and if you’re looking for some decluttering strategies yourself, read the article. Hope it helps.

It begins thusly:

You’ve just received a phone call that someone -a friend, your boss, your mother-in-law -is going to drop by shortly. You fly into a panic and start running around the house, shovelling belongings into an area of shame. Maybe your things don’t even fit into your home any more, and have begun spilling over into a series of storage lockers.

You may just be a candidate for decluttering.

You can find the original Vancouver Sun article here.

Living it up, hotel style

Image courtesy of the Opus Hotel.

The last assignment I took on for 2010 has now been published — a piece about how good hotel design principles can be used in residential homes. As you can imagine, it was pretty darn fun to research — applying a critical eye to the hotel rooms that travellers can often take for granted, and living vicariously in the boots of a high flying tourist.

What I guess is most notable for me is how incredibly different each of the hotels profiled is in character, yet they all still succeed in making guests feel comfortable. If they didn’t, of course they wouldn’t be in business anymore.

Here’s how my story for the Vancouver Sun begins.

Remember when “hotel luxury” made a splash as a decor trend? In the early 2000s, it was all about every imaginable shade of white on white, with bits of beige creeping in. Thousand-count thread sheets and fluffy towels were also an important part of the design scheme. But reducing the look to paint and linens ignores the true rationale of hotel design. Designing for durability and functionality, while being constrained by small spaces and tight budgets, is something many can relate to.

You can find the rest of the story here.

Design Geekout: Karim Rashid

Screengrab courtesy of www.karimrashid.com

I had a chance to interview amazing industrial designer Karim Rashid a few weeks ago for the Vancouver Sun. The man is amazing. He can look at something and almost immediately visualize how it could be made of better materials, be more vibrantly coloured, and be more functional. It’s no wonder he’s astoundingly prolific and in demand. (It took nearly a month to set up the interview because his schedule was so full.)

In person, he wore a hot pink suit with elan, accented with oversized buttons and cufflinks of his own design. He is much taller than you would think.

Unfortunately, the piece never ran in the paper because of space limitations, so I thought I would share it with you now. It’s structured as a Q & A, so the italics are me ‘speaking’.

One on one with Karim Rashid

Canadian-raised industrial designer Karim Rashid is based in New York, although he does work in 41 different countries. More than 3000 of the items he has designed have been produced, spanning furniture, lighting, appliances, accessories, housewares, containers, and jewellery.

The breadth and variety of your designs is astounding. Where do all of those ideas begin?

The world is changing exponentially every day. It’s a combination of how I see the world, and how can I inspire people to shape it. We’ve entered into a new casual age. I’m very interested in sustainability issues, new social behaviour, new languages and aesthetics.

It’s thirty cumulative years of the industrial age – the materials, the production process and methods. I like it all from the micro to the macro.

Right now I’m working on a childrens store, a window blind design, wood furniture for a Bosnian company, lounge chairs for an Italian company, kitchens, a watch… I have a very precise focus on lots of different things.

Where do you stand on the whole form vs. function thing?

Form and function should be inseparable. A lot of companies want you to style things so they look a certain way. I always tell them the design has to come first; you have to build in the criteria for usage and then let that coalesce into one style, not do it after the fact.

As designers, we have to create things of desire, but that doesn’t mean relinquishing functionality. We can have things that are both smart and stylish.

[One of Rashid’s designs, the bestselling Garbo garbage can for Umbra, is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is in twenty different museums worldwide.]

Do you ever stop and wonder at the incongruity of that, a garbage can in a museum collection?

For years I would see prototypes of stunning chairs that you can’t actually sit on, or they could never be produced. Objects in museums are often things that are stunning or beautiful, but they never sell. This is the opposite of that – you could call it democratic art, where you know people like it because they’re buying it and taking it home.

Haute couture and elitism is dying, things are more and more accessible. We’ve empowered individuals to be aware of good design. It’s pushing designers and manufacturers. The companies won’t exist ten years from now if they’re not making unique, usable, cost effective, and innovative products. Think about it – people used to manufacture regionally, and now they do it globally. You have to be ahead of the curve because there are no geographic monopolies anymore.

Design is seen as this elite, educated, bizarre thing that’s not for everyone, but it’s the opposite. Design is the ability to create a built environment, of stuff we touch everyday, and it’s about time designers got some name recognition for what they do. They’re part engineer, in charge of marketing, distribution, sourcing materials… it’s very complex.

What’s next for you?

I don’t really have a master plan, I work from day to day on these projects. I work non-stop. It helps to have a good team and all of the digital technology we have available now.

I am very interested in the aging population, and how we can adapt design to accommodate that.  My mom is 78. I want to see how design can be used to make life better for that part of society.

How much wood could a wood company save

Screengrab courtesy of www.coastecotimber.com

I’m writing a piece for the Vancouver Sun about a very cool show all about wood. It’s at the Rocky Mountaineer Station (near the Home Depot down the road from Main & Terminal.)

The Sun article won’t be published until later this week but I wanted to urge you to see the show before it closes at 4 pm this afternoon.

It features products from Coast Eco Timber, a company that literally lives by the “waste not” idea when it comes to wood.

The products encompass driftwood/beach salvage, forest deadfall, recycled old beams and floorboards, even tiny bits of wood from the scrap traps on the Fraser River.

They’ve been taken by artisans, usually from BC, and turned into amazing furniture. For instance, there’s a huge curved vertical slice of black walnut — it must weigh 300 pounds — that’s been turned into a desk fit for a CEO, or a dogwood trunk salvaged from the yard of an elderly West Vancouver woman. It’s been sliced into two foot lengths and polished. Plant stand or drink holder? I’m not sure, but there’s the most interesting rot pattern in the centre. (They’re in the screengrab up top, second from the left in the uppermost row.)

I also liked the table pieced together from 4″ x 4″ chunks of fir and stained dark; CEO Alana Husby pointed out how some of the chunks were clearly from second growth trees because of how widely spaced the rings were, while others had very dense ring patterns. (Second growth trees have less competition for sunlight/resources, so they shoot up and outwards; original trees are a little squished by their brethren.)

The wood can be used architecturally, for guitars, for utensils, pretty much anything of which the human mind can conceive.

Make sure you head to the back to check out the amazing flooring and veneer being made from wood salvaged in Panama. It’s a long intriguing story, but it involves Teddy Roosevelt, the Panama Canal, and hydraulic underwater saws.

Let There Be Light

For three years — the entire time I’ve lived in my current home — I have hated the light in this part of my kitchen. It glared off the glossy white cabinet doors when I was sitting at the dining table, making it feel like I was bracing for an interrogation to start at any second.

Working in television and writing about interior design, I thought I knew a little something about lighting a space. But I didn’t take the time to assess the situation, nor action to address it. (I just griped about it every time the light was on, and did everything I could to keep it turned off. Stupid, right?)

Then a bulb burned out a couple of days ago, which meant there was no choice but to acknowledge the albatross hanging overhead in the kitchen.

As B was up on the ladder changing the bulb, he discovered that the mounts for the individual lights ROTATED. A quick five minutes of fiddling with the spots to focus them on the specific areas of the stove, the fridge, and the sink and that was it — a world of difference.

With the spots now highlighting the right places, the kitchen feels more like an art gallery than a plebeian place to boil my spaghetti. It’s now my favourite room in the house, and all because there was no choice to deal with the problem.

It’s light years away, if I may. Hallelujah.

IDSwest and how to do shwag right

I got the nod to write the stories about the Interior Design Show West (IDSwest) this year for the Vancouver Sun, and ended up cranking out six stories: one about the amazing Preform modular home being displayed here, one on one profiles with uber designers Karim Rashid and Sarah Richard – DOUBLE SQUEE – and three that will be appearing in next week’s paper, so I can’t quite talk about them yet. Rest assured they were fun to write too.

I popped by the launch party last night in the midst of a hectic day, so didn’t really get a chance to stick around for the short films and other cool things they were doing. I did do a quick wander and I’m really liking the feel of the show this year. Being in the new convention centre space has allowed the booths to be both spaced out a little better and to individually be a little bit larger, allowing for larger installations.

Lots to be seen all weekend, but I just want to give quick props to Kentwood Flooring for best shwag.

Yup, they’re a hardwood flooring company with some pretty innovative products (especially the ‘Couture’ line, which includes denim-coloured wood and smoky grey oak), and they’re giving out chocolate that LOOKS LIKE WOOD FLOORING. Genius — people love edible products and you’ve inserted some branding without being too in your face about it. (Checked the back, the squares are made by Chocolate Arts, so also props for using a local artisan company. Dark chocolate raspberry, milk chocolate, and dark chocolate with fleur de sel, if you were curious about the flavours.)

Okay, dashing off to see Karim’s talk on stage (if it seems like I’m geeking out over him I am; the man is an inexhaustible fount of creativity with more than 3000 items in production, and he works in 41 different countries.)

www.idswest.com if you want to know anything more.

Örling and Wu

I’ve walked by Örling and Wu’s Gastown storefront a few times since its soft opening in July, but had never managed to find time to stop in until the grand opening this week.

Owner Julia (the Wu half of the equation) says the idea is to bring a European touch to West Coast decor, with many of the lines in the store carrying the stamp of approval from the Swedish royal family. Ikea, this is not. (Total aside: I’ve been obsessed with Sweden since the Lisbeth Salander novels came out. I want to figure out a reason to go there and drink glögg.)

The ceramics have a heft to them that I’ve always associated with Europe, as opposed to the thin and luminous Asian porcelain I grew up surrounded by, and the textiles are a modern take on ancient tapestries. There’s a lovely balance between usable soft goods and charming knick knacks, and Wu reports they’ve had a couple of solid months of bizniz already.

Where I think the challenges lie ahead is in drawing traffic to their portion of Water Street — with drenching rain comes reluctance to walk even one extra block — and in their price points. For instance, a lovely pair of cream wool baby booties were $40, and a sizeable aluminum and glass cookie jar was $98, prices comparable to more established joints in both Gastown and South Granville. It’s also entirely possible that I’m cheap; after all, I usually just write about this stuff, rather than buying it.

But as someone invested in the resurgence of Gastown as a whole, I do wish Örling and Wu well and suggest you check them out at 28 Water Street if you’re in the ‘hood.

www.orlingandwu.com

I’ve always associated this cobalt blue with Delft/willow ware; here’s it muted -maybe even opaqued – and combined with an intricate brocade-like pattern.

See what I mean by heft? Thems be weighty suckas.

The white vase on top looks clunky to me. Yes, I’m judgy.

Fabric samples! Fun.

I know designers love throw pillows as a relatively inexpensive way to add colour and variety, but sometimes I look at them and think “Bah! dustcatchers.” And also when there are too many, “um, where am I supposed to sit?”

Party ingredient: BBOT (Big Bottle of Trouble.)

Perfumes literally based on amber. Raw amber smells like cream — that’s how you know it’s real.

Sparkly, textured, pretty. I like.

Wrappers for sweet cuppin’ cakes! (Raise your hand if you know the Homestar reference. You are officially a geek.)

Fun stuff. If I actually ever mailed letters. Emoticons will have to do.