“It was an emotional kind of a thing,” says Reynolds. “The really rewarding part of doing this house over was that it was an opportunity for a client to look again at the house that they’d loved and lived in for quite a while and look at ways in which it could be updated and customized for their needs now.”
The original shingled house with an arts-and-crafts flavor was one of a series of houses that had been designed by NRAP on spec. “We started with taking one design idea for a very simple barn-type house, and then extended it into six different design languages,” says Reynolds. “Each of the houses is quite different. The first is very much a starter home, and this one was about the fourth in the series.”
It was designed so that it could be built with tall cathedral ceilings in the main room (the original choice when the first home on the site was built), but with enough flexibility in the design so that the users could deck over the main living and dining room area to get another master suite or two more bedrooms upstairs, which is what was done in the second-version rebuild.
The exterior of the home and the rest of its basic plan were rebuilt as in the first version.
Reynolds says that the inspiration for the concept came from reading Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. “It was a beautiful book that a lot of us read,” says Reynolds. “His basic premise was that the homes that lasted longest were the ones that were most easily adaptable. So we picked up on that in this series of houses as something we wanted to work on.”
Principal architect Stephanie Bassler says another aspect of refining the home the second time around is that some significant improvements could be made to the energy profile of the house. Two kinds of insulation were used, spray foam and cellulose, and a great deal of attention was paid to making the structure airtight, important both for the performance of the insulation and for the air quality for the occupants.
“We also dealt with some mechanical systems called heat recovery ventilators, or HRVs, that ten years ago, when this house was built, were not even part of the conversation in terms of the sophistication that we’re dealing with now,” says Bassler. “Things are changing quickly, and we’re able to make some serious inroads into changing how buildings behave and how much energy they consume.”
The products on the market are not quite keeping up, though, in terms of affordability. The commonly available consumer brands of things like windows are still pretty expensive, says Bassler, and that’s often a limiting factor in terms of what a project budget can bear. And with mechanical systems, you pay for efficiency. What NRAP tries to do, she says, is make the investments in the house not only pay off over time in terms of measurable energy savings but also make them affordable as upfront costs. “By increasing the insulation levels in the house, we’re able to use smaller mechanical systems in order to heat and cool, so there’s a point there where it all starts to make sense.”
While the second version of the house outside Stone Ridge has features that are laudable in terms of energy efficiency, says Bassler, and is something that they’re proud of, the ideal situation is for a structure to achieve a certified passive house standard of energy efficiency (not to be confused with passive solar design, which is something else entirely, says Reynolds).
The passive house standard, with stringent requirements for airtight-ness and fresh air exchange with energy recovery, is becoming common across Europe, especially in Germany.
In this country, says Reynolds, the standard is just beginning to be used.
“But passive house design doesn’t actually cost much more money, and the investment pays for itself over a reasonably short time frame,” he says. “We think it’s a good place to put an additional investment, because it’ll pay itself back in terms of energy cost savings and comfort. It makes for very comfortable houses.”
