Page 22 - Green Builder January 2017 Issue

to connect separate parts of the house, an on-demand, near-instant PHOTO CREDIT: JESSICA DELANEY
water heating system, and energy-saving fireplaces that help control
how long the home retains heat. Root bound. Builders used the classic bank vault as a model when
designing a temperature controlled, three-chamber root cellar.
Mission accomplished. Keating’s home, Stone Fruit Farm in
Westport, Mass., won a 2016 Silver Prism Award from the Builders For that reason, “we had to understand how the concrete base (and)
and Remodelers Association of Greater Boston for Best Passive Home. how all that glass was going to climb the hill, rather than use the
No surprise about the kudos: Last Valentine’s Day weekend, when the typical builder’s approach: adjust the land to allow the structure to
nighttime temperature plummeted to -5, the house never dipped below be straight, square and level.”
63 degrees—without any energy usage. (During that same weekend,
the daytime indoor temperature ranged from 68 degrees to 72 degrees.) The key was just to let the slab slowly but surely make its way up
the slope. This would let the property dictate how the house would
DRY LIKE THE SUN sit, Katon says. It turned out to be a “simple and graceful solution.”
He credits Keating with sensitivity to the land in his design.
As proposed, Stone Fruit Farm would include numerous planet-
saving facets. One of the more striking ones is a solar corridor that
would link the 1,800-square-foot main house to its neighboring guest
suite, barn, woodshop, root cellar, garage and greenhouse.

Key elements of the corridor included a wall of south-facing
windows to collect sunlight, and a concrete block in the interior to
absorb the heat. That’s because the corridor had to double as the
clothes dryer. According to Keating, who is also his home’s architect,
you’re allowed to have a dryer in a passive house. But clothes dryers
are “wicked energy hogs” that on average account for 12 percent of
a home’s energy bill, he says.

“One of the sad things in our country is that in the last 50 years,
we’ve moved away from drying our clothes outside, even in the
summertime, when it’s easy to do,” Keating says. “If everybody could
dry outside when convenient, we could save millions of BTUs.”

That’s why this house lacks an electric dryer hookup, which would
also have required a special plug and circuit breaker, Keating adds.

Not putting something in was easy enough. What made the 120-
foot solar corridor “a little bit of a head scratcher” was that its location
was going to be on an incline in land that couldn’t be regraded
without “creating major headaches as far as retainage,” Katon says.

PHOTO CREDIT: JON MOORE

Let’s rock. Stone Fruit Farm’s rocky exterior is positioned to absorb the sun’s rays and heat the inside of the house.

20 GREEN BUILDER January/February 2017 www.greenbuildermedia.com