Hudson home a green paradise
AN ANCIENT building alchemy called ‘rammed earth’ helped make this sustainable oasis a possibility
The striking new ecohouse on a hill in Hudson began life as three cucumbers in a container on a terrace in Old Montreal.
Owners Melissa Yip and Bart Pleszewski were living in the city, working as radiologists and wondering how to make the jump from apartments to a place where they could grow their own food and leave a gentler imprint on our fragile planet. Through a miracle of coincidence or fate, they met old high school pals Katarina Cernacek and Sudhir Suri at a birthday party in 2004 and learned they were both green architects, committed to building in a sustainable way.
“They shared our vision of having as green and ecological a home as possible,” Yip recalls. The words “rammed earth” were mentioned.
The next year was spent looking for a site and planning.
“Originally, we wanted to stay on the island,” Pleszewski said. “But land was too expensive, and restrictions were a nightmare.” They settled on five-and-a-half acres up a long, woodsy gravel lane in lovely Hudson, off the western edge of Montreal.
It was originally farmland, and the presence of an ancient apple orchard seemed a good omen. The A-frame kit home on the property did not. “It was a writeoff,” Pleszewski remembers, but it was also an opportunity to put into practice what he’d been preaching. A lot of the interior cedar finish was reclaimed from the kit, as were doors and cabinets.
With a clean slate, the owners and architects decided to build with rammed earth, an ancient building alchemy of earth, sand and cement (part of the Great Wall of China is rammed earth, and has held up pretty well). It is still a common, inexpensive material in warmer climates, but, until now, has never been attempted in the colder conditions of Quebec.
Still, it made sense to try. Rammed-earth construction is rot-and-fire resistant. Walls store and radiate heat. Their sheer mass reduces energy loss and acts as a sound barrier. Sandwich foam core insulation in the exterior walls and you have a construction technique peculiarly suited to our long winters and hot summers.
It also worked with the owners’ and architects’ building mantra of honouring old ways while incorporating the latest technology.
Constructed in 2006-07 and being fine-tuned to this day, the modestly sized 2,700-square-foot house is traditional, with stained cedar siding and stone.
It is also robustly modern: solar panels; enormous endwall berms that conserve heat, store the mechanical guts of the place, and eliminate the need for finished outside walls; and a funky geodesic greenhouse out back to please the heart of that old visionary Buckminster Fuller.
There are a pair of hybrid cars in the driveway by the garage, a water feature with falls for the couple’s young twin girls to splash in, and plantings everywhere.
The greenhouse is alive with raised beds of rhubarb, asparagus and ancient, gnarled rosemary. There are tomatoes and beans, and high hopes for the orchard Pleszewski is rebuilding with heritage varieties almost lost to monoculture.
“We’re already self-sufficient for vegetables,” he says with pride.
“The greenhouse is fourseasons and passive. We get vegetables through February, then begin the new season.”
The house faces squarely south, with a second storey wall of windows that let sunlight in during the winter and deflect it in summer.
There’s a geothermal heating system with underfloor pipes, a 10,000-gallon rainwater tank for toilets and garden and vacuum-tube solar collectors to heat water in a tank in the mechanicals room. There is also a small electric boiler for days when the clouds move in, and a massive soapstone wood stove from the Finnish maker Tulikivi to warm hands and bake bread.
Though there is little doubt this house thinks way outside the suburban box, the open interior is surprisingly bright, warm and friendly, in a minimalist way.
There is wood everywhere, local ceramic tile or Spanish eucalyptus from managed forests on the floors and walls of recovered clay. And what walls! “They’re 12 inches thick inside, and 17 inches outside, with four inches of insulation in the middle,” Pleszewski says. The walls were all compacted by hand.
There’s also a gardener’s dream by the back door — a poured concrete sink to rinse fresh fruit and veggies from the gardens.
The upshot of all this intensive labour is a house that uses less than $1,000 of energy a year, and this despite the fact the owners work from home half the time, on enormous computers central to their professions.
“We had to learn everything from scratch,” Pleszewski admits.
“And we’re still learning. Passive homes are very tight.”
He’s fiddling with the air exchange system, and believes the house will cost less to operate as the owners fully understand this very smart and integrated property.
“It was difficult because we were using the rammed earth technique for the first time,” architect Cernacek says.
“We had our moments. We were lucky the clients were friends, and shared our vision. In the end, we surpassed all the building norms. The clients are happy. We’re happy.”