All Posts Tagged With: "green home"

Designed by architet David Kucera for himself and his wife, the 2700-square-foot Kucera House in Gardiner, New York took honorable mention in New York House magazine’s Best in Green Building Competition. Reconstructed from a vintage barn that was reassembled on site, an 8.5-kilowatt solar array and closed-loop, 285-foot deep geothermal system obviate the need for the Kuceras to draw any power off of the grid whatsoever. The house was completed in August of 2007 and features extensive insulation- R26 for the walls and R40 for the roof- as well as antique hemlock flooring. The design of the house accounts for passive solar heat gain and loss; most windows are on the south side with only three small windows on the north side.

The Ericsson Barn at Milo Vineyards is a 5000-square-foot, four-bedroom home that’s currently for sale in the town of Milo in western New York State, just to the southwest of Rochester. The barn itself was actually salvaged from nearby Watertown in 2007 and was originally built in the 1800s. The project is the brainchild of Tom Johnson, a Parsons-trained designer who completed a similar renovation for himself back in 2005, spending $175,000 to relocate a 150-year-old barn from Canada and refurbish it on a separate plot in Milo. The Ericsson Barn is listed for sale at $1.25 million and was renovated pursuant to LEED specifications, though it’s unclear whether the project ever registered for or is seeking formal certification from USGBC. Johnson recycled the original siding of the barn into flooring and also installed a radiant sub-floor heating system.

The saltbox is one of the country’s oldest home construction techniques and an excellent example of American colonial architecture. Dating from the 1600s across New England, the saltbox’s shed roof and single story would face north with little to no glass in an effort to deflect winter winds. The two-story side of the design faced south, using large windows to passively collect solar energy. The Litchfield House is an effort to implement the principles of the historical saltbox using modern green building techniques. Perhaps the biggest difference in the Litchfield House from a traditional saltbox is that the house’s large roof faces south instead of north, allowing a rooftop photovoltaic system to collect nearly 13,000 watts of solar power annually.

Petrides Homes is a New York City-based designer and developer of residential projects that, last week, announced the completion of Evertson Hill in Millbrook, New York. The 4400-square-foot home sits on 22 acres in Smithfield Valley, just shy of 90 miles north of Manhattan, and offers 4 bedrooms, 4.5 baths, 4 wood-burning fireplaces, and an attached barn with a 500-square-foot loft and two-car garage. Putting aside the debate over whether such a large house should be deemed sustainable, the project incorporated a number of significant green design features even though it is not pursuing any formal third-party certification.

This weekend’s New York Times Real Estate section featured a story about ASAP (which stands for About Saving a Planet), the name Manhattan architect Laszlo Kiss has given the eco-friendly, low cost modular home prototype he designed in Sag Harbor, Long Island. Kiss, who lives full-time in The Hamptons, created the ASAP home as a response to the “energy-hogging” mansions that surround him in his East End neighborhood.