Natural solutions with a few new curves

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HOME & DESIGN
Natural solutions with a few new curves
Ken Radtkey and Susan Van Atta’s house goes far beyond the usual energy-efficient appliances and green building materials. The house is built into a berm that
acts as a natural insulator and blends architecture with landscape. It’s oriented with seasonal shifts of the sun in mind, and it’s designed to funnel rainwater
across gardens and into cisterns for use as plant irrigation later.
House size: 2,660 square feet,
with 380-square-foot glass veranda
Other: 3 bedrooms plus study,
3 full baths, 2 half baths
Planted upper roof retains
home’s heat in winter, provides
insulation in summer.
Solar panels
Planting
medium
Root
barrier
Deck
Rainwater
path
Overhangs
Drain board
Detailed right
Roof
(detailed below, left)
House is built into a hillside that
acts as natural insulator.
Tree shades
house from
western sun.
Planted lower roof
Gutter/
waterfall
Veranda
(detailed
below, right)
Garage and workshop
Patio
Lawn watered by
capillary action.
South-facing windows
maximize natural light.
Sliding glass doors
Catch basin
routes rainwater
to cisterns.
Underground cisterns can
hold 10,000 gallons of rainwater.
Overhang shading: Wide overhangs give protection from summer sun
but allow winter sun to reach into home.
Summer sun
(Directly overhead)
Winter sun
(angled)
Veranda changes by season: A series of sliding glass doors can be closed to trap the sun’s heat in the winter
or opened to increase living space during the summer.
Winter
Spring and fall
Summer
Bedroom
Hillside
Buffer
zone
Study
Living
Veranda
Inner glass
closed at night,
open in day.
Underfloor radiant heating
Outer glass
insulates house.
Inner glass open
– adds more
living space.
Outer glass
moderates
climate.
Glass doors
open – brings
outdoors in.
Source: Blackbird Architects. Graphics reporting by T i a L a i
Outer screen
creates porch,
more air flow.
K h a n g N g u y e n Los Angeles Times
Everyday Earth Day
Coyote House in Montecito is a study in smart green design — and common sense.
By Barbara Thornburg
Oh, how far we’ve come from
Earth Days past — when the
phrase “green home” conjured images of straw-bale structures,
when solar panels seemed like
such an earnest novelty, when
“LEED certified” hadn’t yet crept
into public consciousness.
With Earth Day 2012 almost upon us, nearly 60,000 homes in the
United States are in the process of
being certified in the U.S. Green
Building Council’s Leadership in
Education and Environmental Design (LEED) program, according
to Nate Kredich, the organization’s
vice president of residential market development. Need more convincing proof of just how far we’ve
come? Take a peek at the new
home of architect Ken Radtkey
and landscape architect Susan
Van Atta.
The husband and wife’s threebedroom house nestled into a
Montecito hillside is dubbed the
Coyote House, partly after the
name of the couple’s street, partly
after the howling critters in the
area. Beyond its abundance of energy- and water-saving features,
however, the house is notable for
its utter normalcy: On the most basic level, it is simply a comfortable
and beautiful family home.
“Designing sustainably was a
given for us,” says Radtkey, founder of Blackbird Architects, a Santa
Barbara firm with an emphasis on
sustainable design. “But the most
important goal was to make a
great home.”
To that end, the house starts
with a modern take on the veranda
(pictured on E1). A covered room
overlooking the front garden has a
sliding screen and front and back
sets of glass pocket doors that can
open to the outdoors or seal it off in
various ways, depending on the
season and weather.
A dozen highly flammable
eucalyptus trees — by coincidence,
cut down just months before the
November 2008 Tea fire that swept
through the region — were used to
build the front door, kitchen table,
bookcases, stairs and banister.
Other materials used for interior
appointments were sustainable
too: Cabinets are bamboo, the
floors are cork or salvaged stone,
most of the walls unpainted plaster.
But the house does go beyond
common green materials and approaches, the couple says, “fully
engaging the site to reap an experiential quality of life.”
On the “mirador” above a second-floor bedroom, for example,
solar panels configured as a pergola not only generate nearly all of
the house’s electricity but also cre-
Photographs by
Ricardo DeAratanha Los Angeles Times
THE UPPER ROOF GARDEN on Susan Van Atta and Ken Radtkey’s Coyote House in Montecito sends rainwater toward under-
ground tanks that store it for irrigation (or, if needed, fire suppression). “Designing sustainably was a given for us,” says Radtkey.
latimes.com
/coyotehouse
For a photo gallery with more
than two dozen pictures of
Coyote House plus time-lapse
photography of its construction,
please go to our special online
package.
THE “MIRADOR” pergola
consists of bifacial photovoltaics; the top surface
generates electricity from
direct sunlight; the bottom
surfaces does the same
with reflected ambient
light.
ate a shady viewing deck. “We like
to go up and sit on our porch swing
and have drinks there,” Radtkey
says.
The mirador looks out onto the
second floor’s green roof, which
Van Atta planted with sedum and
dudleya. “Instead of looking out
across a hot roof, we have a lovely
green area to entertain friends,”
she says. Combined with rooms
that are partially bermed into the
hillside, the green roof further
merges the house into the land-
scape.
The main green roof is arced, so
rainwater gently flows down to a
lower rooftop meadow atop the garage, and from there to a gutter
feeding a sophisticated series of
cisterns. About 10,000 gallons of
rainwater can be stored to irrigate
the terraced garden, vegetable
beds, fruit trees and a large lawn
where the couple’s two sons play.
The water-wise lawn consists of
native grass seeded into a 14-inchdeep pan of sand. When it needs
watering, irrigation flows across
the surface of the underground
pan, reaching roots through a
wicking effect and minimizing
evaporation.
“Honestly, a lawn at a LEED
platinum home may not make
sense, but there’s a quality-of-life
issue that you have to consider,”
Radtkey says. “Our sons love volleyball and badminton, and we
wanted a lawn for them to play on.”
Also on the playful side: five
chickens in the side yard next to
the kitchen. The cackling hens
have become family pets that eat
leftovers, supply rich manure for
the compost pile and produce
fresh eggs daily. Near the bottom of
the driveway, a new beehive will
produce fresh honey for toast as
well as pollinators for the orchard.
“It’s a pleasure to go out and
pick the eggs, then make omelets
for breakfast,” Van Atta says.
“Right now we get about one-fifth
of our food from the new garden
and chickens, but we expect much
more as the garden and orchard
mature.”
A lot of what the family has
done can be seen as simultaneously looking forward and back,
Radtkey says.
“A lot of the old-fashioned elements are common sense and
have been around forever, like
green roofs, proper orientation of
the house for shade, using trees
from the site to build furnishings
and interior woodwork — not to
mention having your own vegetables, fruit, fresh eggs and honey,”
he says. “We take advantage of the
latest thinking and newest materials in order to realize values people
have had forever.”
[email protected]