First LEED Platinum home in Athens!
Over the last couple of years we've teamed with local architect and green-building expert Lori Bork Newcomer of Bork Architectural Design on several occasions to provide our clients with innovative and sustainable home designs.
We are proud to announce that Newcomer's personal home on Pulaski Heights is the first home in Athens to earn a LEED Platinum Certification, The U.S. Green Building Council's highest designation. Her home is only the seventh in Georgia to receive LEED Platinum certification.
The custom home was designed and built by Newcomer to incorporate modern design ideas but also remain sensitive to the architectural context of her historic, in-town neighborhood. To do this, she designed a deceptively compact front façade for the 2,632-square-foot home, blending strong horizontal and vertical modern lines with the traditional gabled form and large front porch indicative of the neighborhood’s cottages.
The side elevation reveals shotgun-style length – another Southern tradition that also allows natural passive ventilation. Tennessee fieldstone, stucco and white clapboard siding echo the native and traditional materials used in many of Athens’ oldest homes. “As much as I love modern aesthetics, we didn’t want to build something alien to the neighborhood,” says Newcomer. “So I borrowed signature characteristics of the cottage vernacular to envelope a contemporary living space that fits our lifestyle.”
Inside, the sculptural vault of the glass-clad front gable provides natural light to the open floor plan’s kitchen, living, and dining areas. Newcomer’s architectural studio is located at the back of the house, below a traditional sleeping porch connected to the master bedroom. Locally-sourced reclaimed heart pine floors and salvaged wood from an old shed on the lot further connect the house to the local site and culture. Large windows provide natural lighting as well as passive-solar heating in winter months.
The ingenuity with which she references the traditional craftsmanship of the early 20th Century while designing for the needs of today earned Newcomer the 2011 award for Outstanding New Construction in a Historical Neighborhood from the Athens-Clarke Heritage Foundation.
Responding to rising energy costs is one of the growing concerns of 21st Century homeowners, and it’s why green homes like Newcomer’s are beginning to draw more attention industry-wide. Thanks to air tightness, superior insulation, reflective roofing, Energy Star windows, solar hot water and a host of other energy-efficient features, Newcomer and her husband’s utility bills are roughly the same as they were in a previous house that was a third the size of their new home.
Energy efficiency is just one of the benefits of Newcomer’s green home. Low-flow fixtures conserve water inside the house, and a 1,100-gallon cistern captures rainwater for irrigation outside. With drought-tolerant landscaping, Newcomer’s yard looked vibrant even through the worst of Georgia’s drought in the summer of 2011. Interior finishes, adhesives and cabinetry all have low or zero VOCs (volatile organic compounds), meaning healthier air for Newcomer’s young family.
“The advantage of LEED for Homes over other energy savings centered programs, like Energy Star, is that it looks at green building from a more holistic viewpoint: tackling not only energy reduction, but also responsible site selection, water conservation and the reduction of construction waste while also promoting recycled materials and healthy indoor air quality,” says Leesa Carter, Executive Director of the U.S. Green Building Council - Georgia. “A Platinum-certified home like Newcomer’s represents the pinnacle of what is possible with green-building practices.”
Other energy-saving and environmentally friendly elements included in Newcomer’s LEED platinum home design include:
• EPA-certified low-emissions wood burning stove
• Mineral paints by San Marco, USA on interior walls
• Polished concrete floors with 20 percent fly ash (recycled waste from coal-fired power plants)
• Recycled FLOR carpet tiles by Interface
• Formaldehyde-free EccoDoors with 100 percent recycled content
• Cellulose and ecobatt recycled wall insulation
• High-efficiency heat pump with an ERV (energy recovery ventilator)
• Infrastructure for future solar power installation
• Spray-foam icynene insulation in the roofline
• LED and CFL light bulbs in more than 50 percent of light fixtures
• Pervious paving systems
Although the perception is that a green home of this caliber comes at a cost premium, Newcomer says people are shocked to learn the home only cost around $125 per square foot. In some parts of the country standard home construction costs far eclipse that amount, which is one reason Newcomer suspects the housing industry will emerge from its current slump with greener practices in the Southeast. Newcomer notes that while initial construction costs are higher for some green elements such as windows, insulation and heating-cooling systems, savings in monthly utility bills offset the slight increase in monthly mortgage payments.
Click HERE to watch a video slideshow of Athens' first LEED Platinum home!
11 January 2012
