All Posts Tagged With: "green living"

Hamptons Cottages & Garden magazine is sponsoring the 2008 Idea House in Sagaponack on Long Island. The house is actually a Victorian farmhouse that was formerly owned by novelist James Jones. Sag Harbor developer Peter Sabbeth and his ModernGreenHome company have put a two-story, modern green addition on the back of the house and placed the property on the market for $12.9 million, without any furniture. The antique furniture you’ll find inside the house right now (it’s $30 to enter and open Thursday through Sunday until August 24) was chosen by local designers selected by the magazine. Other items have been created from recycled materials; architect Campion Platt, who fitted out the family sitting room, formed three rugs from discarded cowhide scraps.

New Jersey may soon be the first state in the U.S. to offer a sales tax exemption for certain green building products. Bill S-1778, introduced by state senator Bill Baroni (R- Mercer/Middlesex) would provide consumers with an exemption from New Jersey’s seven (7) percent sales tax for EnergyStar-rated residential appliances, including refrigerators, ceiling fans, and fluorescent light bulbs. Although other states- including Vermont- have offered similar temporary green product sales tax exemptions, the New Jersey legislation would be the first to go permanently on a state’s books. The program would be called “Buy Green, Save Green,” and the bill is also being sponsored by Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt, a Democrat from Camden.

Apparently, even if your floors are bamboo and your finishes low-VOC, that luxury condo may be giving you cancer anyway. The cause is that ubiquitous must-have mostly used for holding take-out containers: the granite countertop. “It’s not that all granite is dangerous,” a radon-detection technician was quoted in the New York Times. “But I’ve seen a few that might heat up your Cheerios a little.” Granite, particularly the varieties imported from Brazil and Namibia, can release both radon and radiation, according to reports and analysis by the Department of Health. The radiation/radon claim is fervently denied by the Marble Institute of America, which claims it’s “ludicrous” and perpetuated by competing materials manufacturers and makes of radon-detecting technologies. They have released their own study to refute marble’s danger.

We’ve written previously about the Harsen House; the 16-story, 22-unit project at 120 West 72nd Street broke ground in late 2006 and developer Anbau Enterprises sold the project out within a scant seven months. The building was designed by BKSK Architects (designers of the Queens Botanical Garden Visitor’s Center, which recently earned Gotham’s first LEED Platinum rating) with interiors by Andres Escobar. Green design elements include hot water radiant heat, FSC-certified oak floors, ducted kitchen hoods which ventilate air directly outdoors, and energy-efficient, floor to ceiling windows. Anbau recently announced that it has completed the 60,000-square-foot project after inking retail heavyweight Sleepy’s (The Mattress Professionals) to a long-term lease for the Harsen House’s 4000-square-foot ground-floor retail space.

Global architecture firm NBBJ recently earned a LEED Silver rating from USGBC for its new New York City offices at 2 Rector Street downtown. The space is the ninth in Manhattan to cop a LEED for Commercial Interiors rating, and joins a number of other design professional spaces that have earned the designation. Three of NBBJ’s five U.S. offices have now earned LEED certification; the firm’s offices downtown occupy 15,917 square feet across the 25th floor of the 80-year-old building. The firm spent over five months reconfiguring its space, and signed a 10-year lease that takes advantage of a number of tax incentives offered to businesses relocating to Lower Manhattan. NBBJ principal Timothy Johnson said that the firm “had to solve the puzzle of taking an 80-year-old building with older infrastructure and making it sustainable.”

Consider your typical New York gym: so much jogging/spinning/lifting, but no one is going anywhere. All that energy, wasted. Architect Mitchell Joachim of Archinode Studio and Douglas Joachim, a personal trainer and lecturer, thought so, too, and designed the River Gym, a . . . well, a “useful multi-planar kinetic space,” really. The concept is actually quite simple - harness all that human locomotion into energy to propel vessels along the Hudson and East Rivers, to several points across the city. In addition to converting the mechanical energy into propulsion, onboard purification devices would clean up the water they travel through. Finally, these floating gyms would take on the non-athletic commuter as well. And instead of TV monitors, everyone gets to watch the changing skyline.