Soon terms like ‘net-zero’ or ‘LEED platinum’ will be part of coffee-shop banter
Sam Cooper
Province
Simon Baston in the organic vegetable garden at his 6,000-square-foot West Vancouver home that has a LEED gold rating. RIC ERNST — THE PROVINCE
Think luxury home. Likely an image of a giant mansion with opulent marble and granite finishing comes to mind. Don’t forget blazing chandeliers and monthly energy bills that rival the gross domestic product of a Third World country.
Now think eco-luxury. If you’re stumped, you’re not alone. But a new generation of upwardly mobile buyers are after green-building features, says Vancouver real-estate marketing guru Bob Rennie. Instead of luxe materials, they’re craving easily maintained surfaces like cork, or healthy hypo-allergenic fabrics. They want smaller and smarter layouts to reduce their carbon footprints, and maybe even boast to friends about it.
Call it the new eco-chic.
According to Rennie the green-housing shift is already reaching maturity, but consumers are still catching up to new standards and lingo. “You talk about ‘net-zero’ or LEED platinum and people are like a deer in the headlights,” he says.
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified buildings typically use resources more efficiently then conventional buildings, with aims of reducing environmental impact. “Net-zero” refers to a home efficiently designed to minimize energy requirements and equipped to power itself with “clean energy” produced internally through sources like solar power.
Rennie says a home’s eco-performance will become its true measure, and families will be engaged in whittling down energy usage.
For example, in Vancouver’s new 600-plus- unit Olympic Village development, Rennie says he pushed for a highly visible wall-mounted gauge (costing $750) that provides energy-consumption readouts and flashes red warning lights. “You’re going to be sitting at the dinner table saying, ‘I didn’t turn on the shower until I got in.'”
Rennie says the green-building movement has passed from visionary to realistic, and soon will be ubiquitous.
“In a few years it will be silly to say a home is certified LEED gold,” he says. “It will be like saying we put a roof on it.”
Developer Simon Baston is pushing the sustainability envelope, with his recently finished 6,000-square-foot eco-luxury home in West Vancouver that came to market at about $4 million, with a LEED gold rating.
Carbon-fuel usage was cut by about 85 per cent through a heating system that extracts heat from air and redistributes it. Water usage was reduced through underground reservoirs for rainwater capture.
Energy efficiency and resource sustainability was obtained through drought-resistant landscaping, solar-panel energy generation, eco-certified wood products, and lower energy windows designed to maximize warmth in the winter and cool in the summer.
Baston says his next projects will be LEED platinum and “net-zero” homes, and then he’ll build houses with “positive contribution systems” that provide power to other users.
“The days of the giant mansion passed with the Hummer,” Baston says. “Within the next five years at the coffee shops, you’ll be talking about your home’s sustainability specs.”
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