Tulsa duplex goes ultra green with four units on one lot

Architect Shelby Navarro’s home in Tulsa, Okla., has lots of eco-friendly features such as a grass roof, but the greenest one may be its siting. He lives in a duplex, each side with two units, on a small lot in a walkable neighborhood.

The home has a living roof with drought-tolerant buffalo grass that doesn’t need to be mowed. It also has a skylight that brings light into the room below.

What makes this so special is that his duplex has quadrupled the 7,000 square-foot lot’s housing capacity. Previously, the land held only one small house, which Navarro had moved — in its entirety — to a different area.

This concept of density and walkability is crucial, and too often overlooked, in green development. I’ve added a rentable in-law suite to the efficient home I’m building in a Washington, D.C., suburb that’s filled with restaurants and shops.

Shelby Navarro shares the home with his wife, Rachel, and their Yorkshire Terrior, Doc.

Navarro and his wife, Rachel, live in one side of the duplex, which he designed, and sold the other. Each side has a comfortable 1,860 square feet with two bedrooms and two-and-a-half bathrooms, plus a 450 square-foot studio apartment over the detached garage.

“We continue to downsize as we learn and grow,” says Navarro, 40, who runs the Tulsa-based One Architecture firm. “We also realize the value in not having to mow the lawn.” His living roof and front yard have drought-tolerant buffalo grass, which doesn’t need to be cut.

The living area has formaldehyde-free bamboo floors and rustic wood trusses.

Navarro’s duplex project — chosen as “This Week’s Green House” — won the top or platinum rating from the private U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program when it was completed in June 2008.

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Since then, he says his monthly utility bills have never exceeded $100, due to the duplex’ ultra-efficient exterior and its geothermal heating and cooling system. The exterior walls are made of prefabricated SIPS or structural insulated panels, which are sheets of plywood around high-density foam. They create an airtight envelope. (I’m using them on my home, too.)

Navarro’s kitchen has Energy Star appliances, efficient lighting and Squak Mountain Stone countertops, which are made of recycled paper and recycled glass.

Also mitigating the home’s energy use are its grass roof, high-performance windows, Energy Star appliances and efficient lighting.

This outdoor shower has wood walls and recycled glass tiles.

Navarro used green interior finishes as well: reclaimed Wisconsin barn wood; formaldehyde-free bamboo flooring; Sherwin-Williams no-VOC Harmony paint, recycled glass tiles, recycled-content bedroom carpet and Squak Mountain Stone kitchen countertops (made of recycled paper and recycled glass.) He estimates the project cost about $210 a square foot.

He’s no stranger to green living. He was raised by his grandparents on an organic farm in Verdigris, Okla., in a house with solar panels.

“I had a pet goat,” he recalls.

What he loves about his city home is its proximity to restaurants, coffee shops, art galleries and other amenities. He also enjoys its natural light.

“You don’t have to turn on the lights during the day,” he said. In a story about their duplex in Natural Home magazine, his wife Rachel also said how much she likes its windows.

The master bedroom has large windows that can bring in plenty of daylight and floor-to-ceiling drapes that can provide extra insulation at night.

“We have two long windows in the master bedroom, and they are my absolute favorite thing about the house,” she said in the story. “It was so unexpected how I would really enjoy them. I lay and watch the clouds go by. We have some bats that live in the neighborhood, and at dusk they kind of flutter around the window. It’s better than TV.”

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Travis found that saturating the slab with water – in his case, lying the slab down flat on a saw table or deck and puddling clean water on to the face of the slab until the entire slab was of the same uniform saturation and then letting it dry out completely eliminated the potential for moisture shadows.

How can you tell if the slab is “evenly saturated”? The drier areas will soak in the water faster than the other spots on the slab so keep applying water until the water is puddled evenly on the face or appears to be soaking in at the same rate everywhere.

This technique will also help if there is an “opposite” condition where a slab has absorbed moisture from a wet object (like laying a slab on top of another slab during drying) and has some shadowing or discoloration.

It is important that if a Fabricator notices any uneven absorption of water on the stone after Fabrication and that it matches equipment or template placements that they do NOT seal the slabs as this will likely enhance those shadows. They should soak the slabs first to balance the moisture and then let them dry before applying the sealer.

**PLEASE NOTE**  Due to the similarities between Trinity and Squak Mountain Stone, please follow the same saturation steps for Squak to prevent shadowing during fabrication.

A returnee to Seattle finds a dilapidated houseboat to love and revive. The remodeled home keeps peace with the city’s waterfront history by using part of the original float in the bathroom and by creating a window in the floor so all can see one of the old float’s logs. A wall of windows keeps light coming in, red cabinets warm up the main living space and remilled fir from the old houseboat’s substructure lines walls. Above it all on the roof, a new deck is just the right space for taking in the marine view.

The slate gray of the Marmoleum floor (in “Lava”) and the Squak Mountain Stone Counters (in “Thunder”) are reflected in the cladding on the ceiling — fir reused from the substructure of the old houseboat, wiped with a bluish oil-based paint to tone down its naturally orange color. The built-in cabinets are by Baywood Cabinets, in “Amber” Plyboo vertical grain bamboo

TO VIEW FULL ARTICLE – CLICK THE LINK:  http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/pacificnw/2011728337_pacificpmankoski09.html

“Squawk (sp) Mountain concrete looks like the backside of my pieces – and I don’t do such a hot job on my backsides. There is a point where putting in waste products compromises the strength and the integrity of the material so much that there is no sense in making it at all.”

So let’s talk a bit about “strength” and “integrity” of our materials, shall we?

When I started my company in 2003, it wasn’t just based on an economics paper idea, as many of you who have followed my company know by now. Before the paper there was a principle: how can a material not only have an environmental benefit but also a social benefit. I looked inward in my own community, Issaquah, Washington, and found an opportunity. While living there Issaquah for about 5 years, my husband and I took our recycling to AtWork!, a local non-profit that provides jobs and training to those in our community who may be deemed “un-employable” because they have disabilities. So when I had to consider a topic for my Master’s paper about local economies I took into account the fact that a sustainable product does not just carry the economic benefit of being locally-made but should have a genuine environmental and social advantage. People spend a great deal of time talking about the environmental elements of materials because those are easily measured. Building social capital is more difficult to understand yet alone quantify. But my thought was if a product could be designed that placed emphasis not just on its environmental provence but also its capacity to provide social welfare as well then we’d have a truly sustainable product. And with access to a variety of recycled goods being collected by AtWork in my own community, it was a no-brainer for me to conceptualize this.

Over the years Squak Mountain Stone has grown and evolved. And yes, the early versions of the product are not nearly as attractive as our recent product but I’ve said to people many times when I’m sharing my experience as an inventor and entrepreneur: some experience you can buy but some has to be earned. And I, along with my guys who have been with me now for the past few years, have all earned a great deal of experience in making Squak Mountain Stone better every day we wake up and cast a slab.  We’ve made improvements in mixers, vibrating platforms, overhead crane systems instead of carying slabs by hand, etc. But I’ve also had several suggestions on how we could save money perhaps if we shredded our own paper with high-volume shredders. Maybe we could save money but at what cost to our community? It would be safe to say that the only real constant in the evolution of Squak Mountain Stone has been where we get our shredded recycled paper.

Squak Mountain Stone was never designed or conceived of to build bridges. It sits on your cabinets and it holds up the microwave. And if you have to stand on it to change a light bulb or reach a high cabinet, you can. So, if you define strength and integrity in that way, we’re fine.

I never like to see when people say bad stuff about us. Its hard to not take it personally. But I appreciated this comment because it serves to provide me and my guys with clarity. The day this blog post was brought to my attention, we were visited, out of the blue, by a mother and her daughter, who is an employee at AtWork in the document destruction division. The mother wanted to bring her daughter in to see where her paper was going and to pick up some samples to show the others who do the shredding work for us.  And there it was. The gentle, compassionate reminder that what we do matters even if people don’t understand why we do it.

For me, this endeavor of inventing and manufacturing Squak Mountain Stone has always been a matter of how does our company’s products strengthen our community and how do we maintain a business of integrity. So in this view of thinking, using mixed waste paper doesn’t just give the product a unique aesthetic and make it lightweight – it is exactly what gives that product its strength and its integrity.

Also taking place this weekend in San Francisco is the Green Festival (http://www.greenfestivals.org/san-francisco-spring/).  Come by the Ecohaus booth and see samples of Squak and Trinity.

We hope to see you there!