Outwitting Mother Nature

Oct 302011
 

November 2010
BuilderNews Magazine
Feature: Building Science

 

Outwitting Mother Nature

Builders Learn to Adapt to Different Regions and Seasons

 

If there is one thing to be said about building homes in the U.S., it is this: There is, in fact, little that can be called standard building practice. From the frozen reaches of northern Alaska to the sweltering heat of the desert, the U.S. is host to some of the world’s most extreme and divergent weather conditions, and to build a home in each environment often requires a uniquely local bag of tricks. In New Orleans, for instance, hurricane-driven rains can pelt a home at 140-plus miles an hour, while in the Pacific Northwest it is the near constant soak of rain that most threatens the life of a building.

To find out how builders are building in these and other extreme weather conditions, we called upon professionals from around the country and asked them to share a few ways they have found to outwit Mother Nature.

HEAT

In Phoenix, the summer heat can slap against the skin like a thousand tiny bee stings. The average daily high, from early June to late August, tops an easy 105 degrees, with record temperatures boiling to 120 degrees or more. During the summer of 2010—the ninth-hottest summer on record—even the nights in Phoenix brought little relief, with an average nighttime temperature of 84 degrees and at least a few nights remaining well above 90.

Keeping out the heat is an obvious priority for homebuilders in such blistering climates, but as local homebuilder Jeff Lupien notes, in the Valley of the Sun there is more than just heat to contend with.

“Unfortunately, the sun gets into everything out here,” says Lupien, a senior project manager with Kitchell Custom Homes, a high-end Phoenix homebuilder. The first and obvious line of defense for beating the heat, Lupine notes, is building a well-insulated home, which Kitchell achieves by sealing the exterior with open-cell foam. But beyond that, the greatest challenge is combating the sun. A few of the more common and less-expensive approaches to beating the heat begin with the design and placement of the home, with the goal of orienting the home to the north and east and away from the sun. When this is not possible, however, Lupien recommends installing high-quality, Low-E, aluminum windows.

Two particular favorite brands of windows for Kitchell clients are Fleetwood Windows and Western Window, both of which manufacture a luxury, all-aluminum, Low-E window with thermally broken frames that help reduce the transfer of heat from the exterior to the interior. If a client wants a high-efficiency window without the tinted glass, Lupien often suggests a specialty glass, the Solarban 70Xl from PPG, which provides an equivalent solar control, without the tint.

Protecting the home’s exterior is another important concern, and for this Kitchell relies on materials that can handle the heat and resist fading. Stone and stucco are favored choices for the siding, or better yet, adds Lupien, synthetic stucco, like Western 1-Koat, from Western Stucco Co., which is more flexible and less prone to cracking.

Lupien also recommends a metal roof with a Grace Ultra underlayment for pitched roofs, while for flat or low-pitched roofs, he suggests using closed-cell foam sealed with a derby-gum membrane. The metal, he notes, sheds the heat more efficiently than tile, and the derby-gum withstands UV deterioration far better than the more commonly used elastomeric coating. “In the cold country,” Lupien notes, “you want the sun to come in and warm the house, but here in Phoenix, we do everything we can to keep it out.”

RAIN

In the mid to late 1990s, what many called an epidemic swept through the Pacific Northwest, from Vancouver to southern Oregon, causing a major health concern and spurring a critical review of the region’s building codes and practices. The problem was widespread failure of building envelopes, resulting in extensive black mold and rot damage and almost exclusively affecting homes and buildings built since the 1980s. By the time the full scope of the problem was realized, “the city of Seattle estimated that 50% of all multifamily structures (in the city) had undisclosed rot that needed remediation,” says Jim Freeling, the founding engineer of Seattle-based firm Building Envelope Engineers (BEE).

“What is going on,” Freeling says, “is that we have southwesterly winds…that take up storms from the South Pacific and hit us along the coast.” These storms, he explains, which might occur six to eight times a year, pelt the Pacific Northwest with rain and cause a phenomenon known as wind-driven rain, where unequal internal and external pressures turn the house into a straw that literally sucks up the moisture. The region’s then otherwise damp climate provides rain-soaked homes little opportunity to dry out.

The Pacific Northwest, explains Freeling, is damp more than 50% of the year, meaning that any moisture that infiltrates a building might remain moist for upwards of six months, and in a warm, wet wall, mold can germinate in a matter of days. That said, Freeling is less inclined to blame the weather. “I don’t blame the wind and the rain for the leaks,” he says. “It has to be in conjunction with poor construction practices.”

What happened, Freeling explains, is that in the early to mid-’80s, energy codes outpaced building practices, calling for tighter and tighter homes that, in effect, couldn’t breathe. In the pursuit of saving energy, the allowable rate of air flow in a home was restricted and ventilation reduced, but when coupled with more efficient windows, an interior vapor barrier and other measures, the result was, in effect, a vapor lock. What moisture got in a wall, stayed in the wall, rotting the wood and causing mold.

Not surprisingly, once the problem was understood, the solution was relatively simple: The wall needed to breathe. Today, explains Freeling, nearly every project in the region is built with a drainage plane (or rain screen) behind the exterior cladding, which sheds the exterior water, while allowing interior moisture to escape. Though there are numerous products used to create this drainage plane—from mesh-covered housewrap to plastic furring strips—Freeling relies on the older method of installing ¾-inch battens over an exterior housewrap and nailing the siding to the battens.

Typically, Freeling specs out any one of several housewraps from VaproShield—depending on need and budget—but he most prefers the company’s WallShield, which works like Gore-Tex to keep out air and rain, while letting moisture escape.

“We are now wrapping a house like we dress ourselves in the winter,” Freeling says. “These are sophisticated designer products and solely what we spec out in the Pacific Northwest.”

COLD

When it comes to building homes in cold-weather climates, it’s hard to contend with builders like Dave Dillard, president and treasurer of 3-2-1 Construction Inc. in Fairbanks, AK. The average winter temperature in Fairbanks, from early October to late April, rarely beats freezing, while midwinter lows can plummet to -25 degrees for days at a time.

“It is just amazing what we are trying to do here,” Dillard says. “We are sometimes trying to keep a home 100 degrees warmer than the outside temperature.” Dillard has been a Fairbanks builder for more than 30 years and has, in addition, held numerous, high-ranking positions in the Alaska State Home Building Association, the Interior Alaska Building Association and the National Association of Home Builders. In 2000, he helped develop the Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC), where he continues to serve on the board.

The CCHRC was founded in 2000 by Fairbanks builder Jack Hébert, owner of Hébert Home LLC, with a mission to research, develop and test building materials and methods for cold-weather climates around the globe. As Dillard explains, prior to the founding of the CCHRC, Alaskan builders often adopted building methods developed in other climates, only to have them fail in the Alaskan extremes. As an example, Dillard cites similar rot and mold problems experienced in the Pacific Northwest. “Several years ago, when energy got so expensive, we tightened up the envelope, but then we caused a vapor problem by not ventilating properly,” he says.

The most recent innovation of the CCHRC was introduced about five years ago and has quickly gained traction with Alaskan builders. It is an insulating method known as the Residential Exterior Membrane Outside-insulation Technique (REMOTE wall system), or as Dillard jokingly refers to it, “outsulation.” The CCHRC borrowed much of REMOTE from an older, Canadian system, and after conducting a series of tests, made a few alterations and improvements.

In simple terms, REMOTE installs the vapor barrier and a percentage of the insulation on the exterior of the home’s sheathing, bringing the dew point to the exterior of the wall and greatly reducing the potential for rot or mold within the wall cavity. The wall is constructed with a standard 2×4 or 2×6 framing, sheathed with plywood or OSB, and then covered completely with a nonpermeable membrane, such as Grace Ice and Water, Tyvek DrainWrap or 8 mil plastic. Four to six inches of foam insulation is then installed outside the membrane and secured to the house by furring strips and long screws. The siding is then attached to the furring strips.

Dillard then uses blown-in fiberglass insulation to fill the wall cavities, resulting in an airtight, well-insulated wall, with a drainage plane behind the siding, an impermeable membrane and a dew point outside the wall structure, rather than within the wall cavity. For any moisture that enters the wall, the interior vapor barrier is eliminated, allowing it to dry to the inside, where, of course, great effort is made to properly vent the home.

WIND

Since long before Hurricane Katrina, builders, architects and engineers were working to build more storm-resistant homes, but since the storm’s shocking devastation an increased sense of urgency has developed in the market. Katrina, and other recent storms, made the worst of Mother Nature an immediate reality, and the fear of a repeat now concerns every community from Galveston, TX, to the southern Atlantic seaboard.

For two homebuilders in the region, both of which are working to outwit the wind, the solution has come down to a question of geometry and the difference between a circle and a square.

Deltec Homes, in Asheville, NC, has, since 1968, designed and manufactured a panel-system home that is literally outside of the box of thinking when it comes to withstanding wind. The company manufacturers a “circular” home, which is more accurately described as a multisided home containing up to 22 8-foot sides and encompassing up to 2,500 square feet per floor.

It is the spoke-like construction that makes a Deltec Home particularly resistant to hurricane winds, explains Steve Linton, the director of sustainable technologies at Deltec. The floor and roof trusses, as with the spokes of a wheel, radiate out from the center of the building, so that any force applied to one side of the house is displaced throughout the whole of the building, vastly increasing its strength. The circular design also diminishes the buildup of pressure on one side of the building, reducing the potential for an imbalance that can facilitate the intrusion of wind-driven rain.

In New Orleans, another company, Build Now, is taking an entirely different approach. Rather than look for an out-of-the-box solution, Build Now is building homes that build the box one better.

Build Now is a nonprofit that was founded in the wake of Katrina with a mission to provide safe and affordable housing to some of the city’s worst-hit residents. A leading feature of any Build Now home—38 of which have been built in the past two years—is that it is elevated on pillions buried some 30 feet into the ground. Breakaway trellis paneling is then used to skirt the home, which will allow any future flooding and fast-moving water to pass beneath the house with minimal impact. This, however, is only one of several measures used to improve the home, says architect William Monaghan, the founder of Build Now. To help increase the strength of the building, Monaghan designed the homes without overhangs, which, he explains, prevents any uplift on the roof during a storm, while also allowing the whole of the building to be locked together as one continuous unit.

Without overhangs, the rafter tails are cut flush to the framing and a 10-foot sheathing panel is used to tie the floor’s rim-joists directly to the rafter tails. This, Monaghan notes, also provides a less-expensive option to metal hangers and other more costly means of tying down the roof.

On the exterior of the home, Build Now, as well as Deltec, then installs an impact-resistant housewrap, such as Typar StormWrap, which helps protect the house from damage caused by flying objects. To insure proper installation of the housewrap, Monaghan draws out detailed plans of everything from taping the seams to flashing the windows, which, he says, the importance of which cannot be overstated—no matter the weather conditions.

Zero weight, infinite span

Oct 292011
 

Summer 2011
Norwich Record: Norwich University Alumni Magazine
News Feature

 

Zero Weight, Infinite Span

An Analogy of Design

 

In the early 1970s, G. Robert le Ricolais, a University of Pennsylvania professor, presented to the fields of architecture and structural engineering the paradoxical dictum: “Zero weight, infinite span,” as the ultimate goal in structural design. The goal, of course, is impossible, but to seek the impossible, le Ricolais supposed, was to obtain, perhaps, the previously unimagined.

Mathew Lutz, a design/ build professor at Norwich University thinks often about this paradox. Norwich University students, over the past year and under the guidance of Lutz and assistant professor Danny Sagan, have been perfecting the designs of a net-zero, passive solar house, the RAE(V) house (pronounced rave). The students have worked with Lutz and Sagan in Norwich’s Design/Build Studio, and though the goal of the project is a tad less lofty than that of le Ricolais, Lutz’s expectation remains the same: Strive for the impossible and see how far you get.

The RAE(V) house is being designed and built as part of the University’s bid for a place in the 2013 Solar Decathlon, a biennial competition hosted by the US Department of Energy. The DOE established the contest in 2002 to spur ingenuity in the field of sustainable design. Each competition invites collegiate teams from around the globe to submit plans for a solar-powered home that most effectively combines cost, aesthetics, energy efficiency and superior design. Twenty teams are then selected to compete, and if selected to compete, the home, once built, must be transported to Washington DC for display on the National Mall.

The RAE(V)house was first conceived in 2010 and submitted for entry in the 2011 Solar Decathlon. Norwich was not then chosen to compete, but Lutz and the others were not deterred. Their sights shifted to 2013, and the RAE(V) house went into considerable design review. “I can show you 20 different floor plans that we thought, ‘okay this is it,’ and then we found something better,” Lutz explains. “We just kept fine tuning it, and it kept getting better and better.”

More than 50 Norwich students have played a role in the conceptualization, design and construction of the RAE(V) house since it was started in 2010. The RAE(V) house is now one of two projects to be designed and eventually built under the direction of the university’s Center for the Integrated Study of the Built Environment (CISBE). The center was created in 2009 to encourage collaboration between Norwich’s architecture, engineering and construction management students, and the RAE(V) house is an example of its success.

Students began construction on the RAE(V) house earlier this spring and Lutz expects it will be finished by the end of August. Nine students enrolled in a summer Design/ Build Studio and spent nearly 80 percent of their class time working “in the field,” where they received regular instruction as the building progressed. “Of that 80 percent,” Lutz says, “there was a lot of talking. We huddled a lot and looked at details.”

The le Ricolais paradox is something Lutz often shares with his students. The goal of the RAE(V house — to be a low-cost, net-zero energy, fully solar-powered home in Vermont — is, if not impossible, extremely difficult to achieve. But like le Ricolais, Lutz pushes his students to reach for the impossible. “That was their challenge,” Lutz says. “And what they came up with was really extraordinary.”

 

The Net-Zero Tract Home

Oct 282011
 

September 2011
BuilderNews Magazine
Feature: Project Profile

 

The Net Zero Tract Home

A Final Frontier in Sustainable Housing

 

In 2005, Meritage Homes, a large-scale, production homebuilder headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, saw one of its most productive years to date. That year, Meritage Homes built close to 15,000 single-family houses, making it one of the top ten production homebuilders in the county. “We just put our heads down and built homes,” says C.R. Herro, Meritage’s VP President of Environmental Affairs. “The emphasis was on doing what we did well,” and that is what Meritage did. The company was founded in 1985, and in just 20 years it became a master at building a broad range of production homes with as most speed and efficiency as possible. Even today, Meritage offers some of its clients a “99 Days. Your Home. Your Way.” guarantee, with prices that can dip below $80 a square foot.

Meritage’s success, like the success of its competitors, had reached a zenith in 2005. The company operates in seven states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Texas. Those same states saw a surge in population over the preceding decade, spurring the largest housing boom in US history. Housing starts in the US, that year, topped a record-breaking 2 million homes, with the vast majority of that development taking place in these classically warm-weather states. By the close of 2006, however, most of that had begun to change. Meritage was still on top, still ranked among the industry giants, only the competition had begun to diminish. 2006 was the beginning of the end for the housing boom. Housing starts slumped, and by 2009, they had hit their lowest level in more than 70 years, with just 580,000 new homes built across the whole of the country. The housing boom was over, and Meritage Homes, like nearly every builder in the nation, was about to face its leanest years in decades. The question Meritage had to ask, as did all others, was simply: How would the company survive?

When faced with a market like this, says Herro, a production builder has one of two choices to make. “The market gives you a square-foot price that the market will bear,” he explains, “and you can either strip down and cheapen up to compete with bank re-sales, or you can come to the market with something that has a different value and creates its own opportunity, and the latter is what we consciously choose to do.”

It was Herro’s job, hired by Meritage in August 2009, to create that opportunity. “I was hired specifically to do innovation for the company,” he says, “so they created a role I don’t think exists anywhere else in the homebuilding industry. They hired a wacky environmental engineer and let me loose.” Herro actually holds two master’s degrees, one in environmental engineering and the other in environmental biology, and he is, in his own words, “the in-house nerd,” at Meritage. “To his credit,” Herro says of company founder and CEO, Steve Hilton, “he said, ‘Hey, we are going to hire someone whose job is to just focus on where the winds are blowing us and what is the best thing that we can do — the highest value for the least dollar — that lets us build something special.’”

That something special, to Herro, was evident from the start. Herro is “a nerd.” He is an engineer. And he knew where the winds were blowing. Herro has worked in the construction industry for more than 20 years, and during all that time he has kept a keen eye on the advancing green-built market. “The building industry,” he observes, “has had very little innovation for the last 40 years, while a tremendous amount of innovation was going on around it.” To Herro, the industry was stilted, caught in the single-minded pursuit of efficiency at the expense of other advancements. Green building in the US, he notes, had remained mostly on the periphery of the overall housing market. A few, generalized innovations had filtered through. Appliances became more efficient. Insulation was beefed-up and then altogether changed. Windows were upgraded. But when it came to a wholesale re-imagining of the single-family home, that was left primarily to high-cost, custom homes and show homes never intended for resale. “All the pieces of the puzzle have existed for 20 years,” Herro says. “We just went through the trouble of putting it all together. All I did was stand on some really broad shoulders, take the best of the best from around the world, and that is our program.”

Meritage’s new program, under the direction of Herro and officially launched in September 2010, was to design, build and sell the US’s first net-zero energy tract home, at a price competitive with the production home market. The company now builds its net-zero homes in two communities and offers a similar option on all other homes it builds. “The first thing we did,” says Herro, “was to look at the building shell: the windows, the insulation, the framing, the conditioned attic, the lighting system and the appliances, all of which works to cut the energy demand for the footprint of that house in half.” From there, Meritage moved on to energy production, part two of the net-zero equation. The company joined forces with EchoFirst, Inc, manufacturers of the EchoFirst Solar System, an innovative dual solar PV and thermal array, with an integrated air management system. Standard on nearly every Meritage Home is now a 2.15 kWh EchoFirst Solar system, and for roughly $10,000 more, clients can upgrade to a 5.64 kWh system that would make the house a net-zero energy home.

The EchoFirst system, itself, represents an impressive advancement in efficiency, increasing the energy output over a similarly sized PV system by upwards of 100 percent. Meritage’s partnership with EchoFirst, Inc. shows why the production homebuilder belongs in the sustainable market. As Herro notes, though many builders offer similar amenities, most are offered as add-ons and built on a house by house basis. Meritage made these amenities standard, and by doing so, it was able to leverage its economy of scale, both in terms of material costs and installation. “A big piece of this is our trade partners,” Herro says, “because all the things we do on these homes, we’ll do 3,500 times. We spent a year designing, and we spent six months with our trade partners (framers, plumbers, etc.) getting their heads around it.”

Oriana Schooley is a sales associate for Meritage in the master-planned community of Verrado, just outside Phoenix, Arizona. Arizona, Phoenix and the surrounding Maricopa County was, and still is, one the hardest hit regions for foreclosures in the US. Roughly 15 percent of Arizona households received a foreclosure notice in 2009. The market is tougher than it has ever been, says Schooley, and yet she remains decidedly optimistic. “This has been great for us,” she says of Meritage’s new net-zero program. DMB Associates, Inc, out of Scottsdale, AZ, is the developer at Verrado, and five builders, including Meritage, are vying for the buyer’s attention.

Meritage, to help both educate and attract those buyers, has built a partially deconstructed model home, which the company’s uses to emphasize its new “extreme energy efficiency” approaches. Some clients are sold on the spot, Schooley says, while others need as much educating as they do selling. The sales pitch takes longer and it is far more complex, but the results are impressive. The Meritage sales team, in the Verrado community, has managed to outsell its leading competitor by more than three to one, and this, Schooley notes, with homes that can carry a premium of $20,000 or more.

“I think it is the cake and the icing, too,” she says. “Here, there is no compromise. I am the largest lots, the most square-footage, the most efficient, the most technologically advanced, and I am the most expensive. So, when it comes down to it, there is no real explanation for why it is going as well as it is, but my understanding is that we’ve taken a two-year project and we are down to the end of it (after) only ten months.” And this, she adds, in the worst housing market in US history.

“Is there a lot of potential coming?” says Herro, “Yes. Have we extracted all that value? No. But, we are extracting some, and in this market, that’s just fine with us. These homes, with this kind of incorporated extreme energy efficiency, have demonstrated to be more profitable for us than conventional construction.”

Ana Araguas-DiTursi: tango teacher, empanada entrepreneur

Oct 282011
 

Autumn 2011
Vermont Life Magazine
Profile: Q & A

 

Every Vermonter Has a Story

Ana Araguas-DiTursi: tango teacher, empanada entrepreneur

 

Though Ana Araguas-DiTursi left Argentina 16 years ago, the culture of her native country continues to shape her life in Vermont.

A former professional ballerina, Araguas-DiTursi works as a dance instructor, teaching traditional Argentine tango and other dances to any Vermonter who has “the spirit and the soul” to learn. Araguas-DiTursi and her husband, Robert DiTursi, the parents of two small boys, also operate Ana’s Empanadas, a takeout food business built on her recipes for the traditional Spanish pastries. Araguas-DiTursi began selling her empanadas four years ago from a table at the Rutland Farmers Market, and the couple has since opened a winter snack bar at the base of the Needle’s Eye chairlift at Killington resort and a commercial kitchen and storefront in Rutland.

VL: What made you leave Buenos Aires and move to New York?

AA-D: The ballet was run by the government … and one day the government says, ‘Why are we paying all these dancers? No more ballet.’ That was in 1994, one year before I came here [to the U.S.].

VL: Why did you and your husband decide to move to Vermont?

AA-D: Robert knew Vermont, his uncle owned a house in Lake Bomoseen, and growing up, he loved Vermont. And then after 9/11, we were scared. We had a house in Brooklyn, and all the papers from the towers came into our backyard. … There was too much going on, and Robert says, ‘Let’s move to Vermont,’ and I said, ‘Sure,’ and we moved up here, and it is a wonderful, wonderful state. I just love it.

VL: So, no regrets?

AA-D: No. It is a little cold sometimes.

VL: What is your earliest memory of dancing tango?

AA-D: I danced tango when I was 4 with my dad, every weekend. It was like a family dance. Every time I return to Argentina, we dance tango. It is so normal for us. My dad puts the radio on and everybody in the family dances tango.

VL: How long have you taught tango in Vermont?

AA-D: For seven years, at schools, Castleton College, in Brandon, and I’ve done a lot of private lessons. They come to my house, actually. I have a little place in the basement, and the couples come and I teach private classes.

VL: What is the secret to dancing a good tango?

AA-D: My dad used to say, ‘You can dance a good tango, even if you do a simple movement, if you have it in your heart.’

VL: Is there a different style of tango that you teach in Vermont compared to the tango of Buenos Aires?

AA-D: No. Actually, I find that here in Vermont it is more like Argentine tango than when you go to Texas or other states. Tango is taught different all over the place, and the other tango they have here in America is American tango.

VL: How is it different from Argentine tango?

AA-D: American tango is more artistic, let’s say, like a waltz, like ballroom dancing. They do not do steps like Argentine tango. Argentine tango is more close and little steps.

VL: What spurred you to start selling empanadas at the farmers market?

AA-D: It is very difficult to be a ballet instructor and tango dancer in Vermont, and I am a very energetic person. I have to do something all the time. So, I called my husband and said, ‘I don’t know what you are thinking, but I am selling empanadas at the farmers market.’ And that’s it, I put my baby in my backpack, he was six months, and I went and sold my 50 empanadas. They ate them cold.

VL: When did you realize you had a viable business?

AA-D: That started gradually. I spent $100 to make my first market. After my third market, I said ‘Wait a minute, everyone has a tent, and I don’t have a tent.’ I don’t think I really realized it [was viable] until I got the business at the mountain.

VL: Where do you get your recipes?

AA-D: I do a lot of original Argentinean (recipes). The Humita is a family recipe. My mom taught me how to make it. I called my cousin in Argentina for the La Bomba, a three-cheese empanada. What I like to do is go to a city in Argentina and stop and talk to the owner of an empanada business, and they are very nice and just give me the recipes.

VL: Since you brought tango and empanadas to Vermont, is there anything about Vermont that you’ve brought back to Argentina?

AA-D: It is funny. I actually think that when I go back to Argentina, what I bring is the peace that is in this state.

VL: Peace?

AA-D: Yeah, peace. It is more relaxing. Buenos Aires is a little bit similar to Manhattan. Living in the city is very stressful. Here, Vermont is peace. The people are amazing.

I’ve met the best people in the world in Vermont. The farmers are very intelligent people and just down [to] earth. Vermont people are so kind. It is different. They are different.

A Texas Whole House Remodel

Oct 012011
 

October 2011
BuilderNews Magazine
Feature: Project Profile

 

A Texas Whole House Remodel

Keeping In-line With the Joneses

 

The Rosedale neighborhood of Austin, Texas, just north of the city’s downtown, is a quiet, residential neighborhood of winding, tree-lined streets and modest, single-family houses. Most of the homes in Rosedale were built in the 1930s and 40s and much of this original housing remains. Low-slung, single-story cottages and ranch homes sit on large, oversized lots that often top a quarter acre or more. Broad, manicured lawns, side yards and hedgerows separate one house from the next. It is the type of neighborhood where young couples move to start a family and where older folks have remained long after their children have grown. It is also the type of neighborhood, especially in Austin, that has recently attracted considerable attention.

To the city of Austin, Rosedale and neighborhoods like it are an important part of the city’s history, demarcating its progression from a small, southwestern capital into one of the most vibrant and acclaimed cities in the country. Rosedale, once having defined the outer limits of Austin, is now part Central Austin—a collection of some 40-plus neighborhoods that make up the city center. And the city, itself, is booming. Forbes rated Austin the “Best City for Jobs in 2011,” and over the past decade the population has jumped by nearly 40 percent. But, as often happens, with such a sudden and rapid rate of expansion there also comes problems, and Austin has seen its share.

Mark Lind is a Senior Project Designer with CG&S Design-Build, an Austin-based firm that recently completed the whole-house remodel of a typical, single-story Rosedale cottage. It was a squat, nondescript house, longer than it was wide, dark grey with a faded brown asphalt roof and a tiny one-car garage tacked onto the end. Two bedrooms and one bath sat on 1,100 square feet, the interior chopped up into your standard, mid-century dining room, living room and kitchen. The owners, a young professional couple, collect mid-century modern furniture and they wanted the remodel to fit that style. Lind was thrilled. “The original house wasn’t very distinct,” he says. “It was sort of like a cabin, and quite often remodeling clients want the addition to look like the original house. So it was quite refreshing to have people say, ‘No, we want to completely change the appearance.’”

CG&S first met with the clients in the fall of 2008, and Lind says that straight away things went well. A  CG&S crew visited the site, took measurements and Lind drew up some preliminary designs — just to get the ideas rolling. When, at their first official meeting and before Lind shared his ideas, the clients conveyed more of what they were looking for, Lind knew he had hit the mark. “It was as if they had already seen the drawings,” Lind says — that’s how close he’d come. Unfortunately for Lind, CG&S and the clients that was where the ease of the project ended and the worst of their troubles began.

CG&S named the project the Silver Agave house, for the three-foot, spiked desert plant that stands at the end of the drive. The Shoal Creek, a tributary of the nearby Colorado River, runs through the center of Rosedale and skirts the far back corner of the roughly 9,000-sqaure-foot lot. This, unfortunately, put the Agave house in the Shoal Creek floodplain, which attracted the attention of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA, since 1968, provides low-cost, federal flood insurance for houses in high-risk areas. The insurance is cheap, cheaper than it would be otherwise, but as a consequence, FEMA also gets a say in what can and can’t be built. The FEMA approval alone took six months, set strict restrictions and vastly hindered the design. “Basically, [FEMA] told us: ‘Limit yourself to the existing footprint, you can’t spread out,’” Lind says, “and so we changed from pushing out to deciding we had to go up.”

But to go up, as Lind notes, would present its own list of challenges and concerns, the most important of which involved the existing Rosedale residents. Rosedale, like most of Central Austin, has recently attracted a new, younger buyer, looking for homes close to the city center. As a result, the neighborhood is being redeveloped, and in several instances this has led to some of the smaller, historic homes being torn down and replaced with much larger, two and three-story homes often out of character with the existing neighborhood. Many of the residents objected, and the city reacted. In 2006, the Austin City Council passed the “Residential Design and Compatibility Standards,” dubbed the McMansion ordinance for its far–reaching and contentious efforts to limit the size and shape of homes built in Central Austin. The list of McMansion limitations is numerous and includes, among others, a restriction on the home’s floor space to no more that 40 percent of the lot size and frontline setbacks based entirely on the average setback of the surrounding homes.

While Lind’s design of the Silver Agave fit well within the McMansion parameters, not even coming close to such expansive dimensions, Lind says that nonetheless the ordinance has had a major impact on his work as a designer.“You have to put this into the context of this really rancorous debate over what is or is not a McMansion,” he explains. “What no one wants now is to be accused of building a McMansion.”

The owners wanted to reinvent the house, to add more space, and the budget allowed for a near doubling of the existing home. The challenge for Lind, however, was to do all this, on the existing footprint, while creating a look that remained “compatible” with the surrounding single-story houses.

The first to go was the garage. Originally a one-car garage built on a shoddy concrete slab, Lind transformed this into a two-story addition and nearly 500-sqaure-feet of added living space. Immediately, Lind saw the impact this could have on the home’s appearance and sought to reduce it. ”I didn’t want to have a tower sticking onto the front of this one-story cottage,” Lind explains. The first floor siding is cement stucco, intended to give weight and presence at the end of the driveway. Above that, a slender bank of horizontal windows rims the entire structure, dividing the lower and upper floors. Vertical, fiber-cement siding with cedar battens on the second floor help further this division. The near-flat roof, no attic and broad overhangs then cap the tower, stopping the eye and condensing the visual height of the structure. The continuation of the standing-seam roof down one side of “the tower” further draws the eye downward, as would the flow of water over a waterfall.

Lind then continued this diminishing approach to the design for the second-floor addition on the main house. A master bedroom and bath attaches to the second floor loft and stairwell that, along with a first floor dining area, replaced the old garage. The result is an 800-sqaure-foot master suite that includes a utility room and second-floor living area. Again working to reduce the home’s visual impact, Lind slid the addition to the rear the house and recreated the original low-pitched roof at the front. The attic was once more eliminated and the second floor ceiling follows the pitch of the roof — from 8’ 6” at the peak to 7’ 6” at the outside wall. Another long row of windows faces the street. “The second floor does not have any wall at all, just a bank of windows,” Lind explains, “so that the apparent massing of the house still reads like a one-story house.”

The ground floor of the main house was left much like it was. The same roof line. The same front windows. And the recently installed Ipe (a Brazilian wood) covered porch and banister were left intact. “You don’t put Ipe up and paint it,” Lind explains. “It’s just too expensive.”

Inside the house, the interior is a stripped-down, box-like design that coordinates with the home’s exterior. The existing bedrooms were repainted and the ground-floor bath updated with new fixtures and a low-cost ceramic tile. The main living area was then opened up to include the added dining area, the sparse, open staircase and a compact horseshoe kitchen that faces the living room. The inclusion of the beefy, custom-built shelving above the kitchen counter accentuates the mid-century modern motif and melds well with the owners’ tastes in furniture.

At a finished 2,100 square feet, it is fair to say that the Silver Agave house achieved most, if not all, of what Lind, the clients, FEMA and the Rosedale community had hope it would. It is new. Modern. Different. And yet, in the vernacular of the existing neighborhood, it fits and fits well, ready to blend into the historic fabric of Rosedale, rather than standout as an obvious (and oversized) addendum to it.