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Focus : Living & Working Green - Real Estate & Construction

Sylvain Côté and his family had been renting a home in Yorktown for about 14 years before deciding to buy one on Truesdale Lake in South Salem a few years back.

Being the owner of Absolute Remodeling, he decided to, well, remodel the house. But his version of remodeling was to take the entire house down to its eight-sided foundation and rebuild. And add another floor. And extend the chimney. And add a cupola. And, oh yes, make it green.

Twenty-eight months after closing on the house, Côté, his wife, Tisa, and two daughters are enjoying the fruits of his insight and labor. The entire takedown and rebuild took 23 months, not including the five months he gave himself for designing. The family moved in March 2006. His work has paid off among his peers. Last month, Remodeling magazine gave him the Merit Award for excellence in design and construction and Professional Remodeler magazine gave him the Best of the Best Award for rebuild on an existing foundation.

The Côtés closed on what would become their dream home just before leaving for vacation to the Outer Banks. Côté brought the original drawings with him down to North Carolina. “On the rainy days I’ll do some sketches,” he thought. “Of course there were no rainy days, so I ended up doing a lot of sketching and came back with no tan at all.”

After returning home, he started reading a lot about the green movement in architecture, which was just catching on. He saw a magazine ad for a green convention in Austin, the fall after buying the house. In October he was in Texas. “In those two to three days, I learned more than in 20 years. It was awesome.”

A few months after, armed with designs, permits and a newfound energy and knowledge gleaned from Austin, Côté and his crew took the “upside-down house” – the bedrooms were on the ground floor – and turned it right-side-up. The only framing he kept was the lower-level floor joists. And the two-story chimney also remained. He reclaimed stone from the house to add to the chimney so it would clear the roof line of what would soon become a three-story house. Built in 1983 on a steep incline to the lake, the house, a contemporary with vertical siding, could not be seen from Truesdale Lake Drive. Building up afforded the Côté family better views of the lake, plus the house can now be seen from the road.

OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Côté calls his new home contemporary craftsman. The interior features wood and stone reclaimed from the original house, as well as other old structures. The walls are finished with colored natural earth plaster, offering a stuccolike appearance.

So what constitutes green?

Trying to come up with an official definition may be difficult, Côté said, because there are so many factors.

“The main things are durability, maintenance and the amount of energy it takes – the transportation involved, does it come from the other side of the world. You burn a lot of fossil fuel to bring it here.”

Côté reclaimed as much as he could from the old house and the property. The barn doors to his office, the library wall, the dining table and two vanities were made from reclaimed wood.

“We have beams more than 200 years old. We didn’t have to cut trees,” he said. The wood came from Reclamation Lumber in New Haven, Conn., which specializes in finding old wood. “One of the benefits is the patina,” Côté said. “You can’t get that from a freshly cut tree.”

The house has a lived-in feel because of that. Green doesn’t have to be some cold, sterile, eco-friendly, energy-saving environment. The hickory, chestnut and pine floors bring a metaphorical warmth and richness. Their to-the-touch warmth comes from radiant heating that was placed before the floors were put in. Wood sliced thin from old, big beams also provided the wainscoting in the house. But wood from old buildings does not alone make a green house.

PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE

Côté’s house was projected to produce 80 percent energy, he said. “But we forgot about a couple things, the X factor, the teenagers … so we’re producing about 40 percent.”

The 33 solar panels on the roof  produce electricity for the lights and appliances. An underground propane tank provides for hot water and heat.

The home also has a passive cooling system that utilizes the cupola, which has windows that open and close by remote control and provide a stack effect. Côté also placed trellises in front of kitchen windows to provide shade from the summer sun. The windows themselves offer passive cooling from the sun because they contain tinting so there is no need for window treatments.

The house also has more trellises on the southwest side and the roof has a 4-foot overhang that “acts like a big umbrella.”

The siding is engineered PVC material that never has to be painted or stained, Côté said. “Just hose it off if it gets dirty.”

He also used PVC material for decking and railing as well as other touches where wood would normally be used.

All of the exterior and most of the interior lights use CFLs, compact fluorescent light bulbs, which use a quarter of the energy of conventional light bulbs.

For all his work, the Côté home was awarded the 5 ½ -star Energy Star rating, and a New York state Home Energy Rating System ranking of 92.8. Homes that earn the Energy Star rating must meet guidelines for energy efficiency set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Côté intends to use his home to showcase the benefits of green architecture and remodeling.

“The public awareness of green in this area is very poor. We are one of the last areas of the country to embrace green building,” he said. He attributes that to the wealth of the area, as well as to people being more traditional when it comes to design and proven building techniques. “In this business, it’s 10 to 20 years before a product is accepted. We have a lot of work to do.”

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