Day 1: Austin

The Cool House Tour is a one-day, once a year event.  Celebrating its 16th year, this tour showcases Austin's "top homes featuring sustainable building and design."  Spread out all over the Austin area, these homes showed the diversity of design available to like-minded people interested in making sustainable and earth friendly choices.  We started south of the city and worked our way north through a variety of projects, all exhibiting sustainable design.

 

 9717 Peakridge Drive:  The first thing you noticed about this house designed by Hill Country EcoBuilders is that it is was what most people would consider a traditional subdivision between traditional production homes.  The outside of the home was more custom and sat beautifully on the lot, but that is where the similarities with its neighbors ended.  The home is completely off the grid for water, relying on a 20,000 gallon rainwater tank for both interior and exterior water capable of supplying the home for 1 year without rain.  They also had a geothermal HVAC system which as the owner pointed out was not only efficient, but extremely quiet.  The floor plan maximized the use of space so there was virtually no waste and the beautiful finishes made the home warm and inviting.  Natural daylight in the home and a beautiful covered porch made this home a great combination of design and function.

3115 Sacbe Cove:  Part of a green oriented subdivision Las Casas Verdes, this home was the highest rated 5-star home in Austin as of spring 2012.  The development uses both active and passive solar features for each home as well as other sustainable building practices such as orientation, minimal building waste. and thermal chimney design to help pull hot air away from living areas.  There was great attention to detail including switches in the bathrooms with timers and windows that opened to allow for a cross breeze to help cool the home.

M Station, 2906 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.:  The M Station is a Foundation Community project that represented the incorporation of sustainable design into multifamily developments.  The additional element of affordable housing added another level of sustainability in that many of the features were benefits to the residents living on limited income.  A former concrete manufacturing plant, this site was reborn into 150 units and an on-site child care facility run by Open Door Preschool.  The apartment appeared to be fairly basic, but out of view were solar panels, a solar thermal hybrid system, and a 65,000 gallon rainwater collection system.  The cool urban design gave the complex a sense of truly touching the future.

The Stanley Studio, 1901 EM Franklin Avenue:  The personal-scale mixed use nature of this project made it unique - housing the owner's studio, home, and an urban farm.  Perhaps the coolest room was the office/meeting room inside the recycled silo.  Extensive windows allowed for abundant natural light and the recycled materials and metal work gave the project great character.  The green roof, rainwater tank, and building orientation all demonstrated the owners desire to minimize their carbon footprint while still living in an urban location.

4205 Camacho Street:  Located in the Mueller neighborhood, this home showed the blending of current technology and historic design.  The craftsman style home had rich wood finishes, beautiful stonework, and a huge front porch.  As part of the Pecan Street Project, this house is helping to collect data on energy use and solar energy production.  The Mueller development, which we revisited later in the week, has created an environment that encourages a sense of neighborhood with sidewalks, front porches, and random green space.  The other interesting thing about this property is that they built a small apartment on the lot allowing them to maximize the livability of the space.

1901 Alegria Road: This house was built on an infill lot in a developed neighborhood capitalizing on its exceptional location.  It also had a craftsman style architecture and incorporated recycled and repurposed material.  As a 5-star rated home, this property combined such features as cross and stack ventilation to help regulate the interior temperature.  Spring Builders, the builders of this home, are a local company, are committed to helping "build and develop smart, sustainable, adaptable and enduring properties for the discerning client."  The creative use of space, including a play space with a Murphy bed that transformed the into an additional bedroom, illustrate the level of thought as it relates to living and using the home.

7705 Mullen Drive:  Set in a north Austin neighborhood, this was more than just another great house, despite the name of the design company.  The space was thoughtful and intentional even before you entered with simple and native landscaping surrounding an established tree, which doubled as landscaping and cooling for the front porch.  The house was built with great attention to craftsmanship and efficiency as well as the surrounding homes.  It also incorporated materials reclaimed from the demolished house for use in the new home construction, including 75% of the hardwood floors.  The carport, a feature we saw repeatedly on the house tour, had a beautiful wood ceiling making it the perfect place to extend outdoor living space and include the neighborhood.

913 Taulbee Lane:  Built as urban infill, this home also boasts the use of straw bale construction.  Designed by the Sustainable Design Center as a multi-generational home, it had an open living space with the bedrooms separated by floor or open air walkway.  While the cedar posts and stucco finish makes you feel like you could be in Santa Fe, the materials were primarily local and construction was completed 'out of order' to allow for the building of the roof early in construction to help accommodate the rainy Austin weather.  Another interesting feature of the home was the absence of duct work, as each room was cooled by separate units or "inverter mini-split systems".

7119 Valburn Drive:  Set in the hills of northwest Austin, this home earned the cool house tour guidebook cover for a reason.  The location was breathtaking, literally, and the home designed by Barley & Pfieffer incorporated the views, the breezes, and amazing material into a usable and spectacular design.  The home was built for a couple nearing retirement age and has all the main living ans master on the entrance level.  The downstairs houses an office/living space with a small kitchenette and additional bedrooms.  The separate downstairs entrance allows for the possibility of private family visits.  The materials of this home were spectacular including a hollowed out geode used as a sink bowl.  The designer said one of the greatest challenges of construction was installing the roof.  The updrafts from the canyon below kept lifting it and and the solution was to install additional piers to anchor it to the canyon wall - a good reminder that only so much of a construction project, sustainable or otherwise, can be anticipated.

14321 Lake Victor Drive:  The final house on the tour, which we did not have time to visit, was built by the production builder KB Homes.  The reason it merits mentioning is that it illustrated a trend in production builders trying to incorporate the sustainable features represented in the custom homes we visited on this tour.  Other home builders like Lennar are also seeking out neighborhoods and home buyers that are interested in green features.  By offering these features as options that balance operational efficiency and ecological responsibility, they are allowing a wider variety of people to enter the sustainable home market.

TAKE AWAY OF THE DAY:  Cool, sustainable projects may have many things in common, but they are far from uniform.  The beauty of a shared vision is that it allows the person applying it to have a tremendous amount of freedom and creativity.