In the age of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, being called a “nerd” is a badge of honour.
And if there were ever home builders who could proudly carry the banner of nerd-dom, it might be Solares Architecture and Equinox Development, designers of a startlingly innovative home in Cedarvale Park.
This renovation project has been completed so recently that there still isn’t any furniture to stand in the way of the real story: This is a home that’s so sustainable, so charts-and-graphs happy, so humble on the outside while deliciously innovative on the inside, that it’s a nerd’s paradise.
Get ready to geek out.
Project manager Susan Hunter of Equinox Development and homeowner Drew (who asked that his surname not be used) won’t settle for anything less than LEED Platinum when the project wraps later this year. While you needn’t be a nerd to have heard of Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design, you’d have to be real Poindexter to strive for the top designation, because it’s really quite difficult. You even have to do math.
Before the math, great care must be taken in selecting a suitable home. Drew says he and Ms. Hunter looked at “over two hundred” properties before settling on a little between-the-wars bungalow that backs onto the Cedarvale ravine: “I was [looking] at Bloor West for a while, Cabbagetown, the Annex … I needed something that had transit access – because I really don’t like to drive downtown – and something that had green space.”
“I was looking at things like zoning,” interjects Ms. Hunter. “[The Cedarvale house] hit almost all the triggers, because the percentage of the zoning was favourable, and the existing footprint was favourable, the orientation was favourable, the access to transit … and the compelling part was when we did the ecoENERGY
A tent? Oh, it leaked heat like a tent. Right. As a matter of fact, it scored an ultra-low 18 points on the scale. An average home with some insulation and fairly good windows, by comparison, scores a 50 or 60. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” laughs Ms. Hunter. “There was tremendous opportunity here.”
With homeowner Drew in the driver’s seat, the transformation of this one-storey home into a two-storey sustainable showpiece really began once husband-and-wife design team Tom Knezic and Christine Lolley of Solares were brought on board; despite being geeks for green who specialize in “high-performance envelopes and energy efficiency,” the couple had yet to work on a residential project that aimed for top LEED certification from the get-go, perhaps because the LEED for Homes program was released just as the project began.
“We were the Guinea pigs for the ‘H’ program,” quips Ms. Lolley, who felt at first as if the team was “just counting points.” However, “when we got into the full swing of things then it really started becoming a very holistic approach; I felt that the LEED formwork naturally becomes an excellent way of organizing your project.”
And for a renovation, it was a very large project indeed. To the original shell of double-brick walls, three inches of spray-foam insulation was applied for a rating of R-20; to the new second storey, additional rigid foam was added to achieve R-25 (the new second storey is clad in reclaimed historic brick from southwestern Ontario, making it almost impossible to tell it’s an addition). The roof was insulated to an R-value of about 50. And although polyurethane foam has a high carbon footprint, the fact that the home saves so much energy balances the equation out where LEED is concerned.
