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By JANET COOK
News staff writer
May 17, 2006
Tom Kelly has been on the cutting edge
of environmentally-friendly home design and construction for years.
As president of Portland-based Neil Kelly Company, one of the
Northwest’s oldest remodeling and custom homebuilding companies, Kelly
has worked to bring “green” homebuilding into the mainstream. As far
back as the 1970s, Kelly and his father (Neil Kelly started the
company in Portland in 1947; Tom took over in 1979) started a
“weatherization” program, promoting energy-efficient windows and
insulation. They even began recycling house parts for re-use long
before it became trendy. Around the same time Kelly introduced a solar
hot water division at the company.
Photo courtesy of Neil Kelly
Company
In the 1990s, Kelly took his
environmental passion further by adopting The Natural Step, a paradigm
of approaching business from an environmental perspective. In 2001,
Neil Kelly’s three-story Lake Oswego showroom earned the Northwest’s
first-ever LEED certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design).
“We’ve been involved in this kind of thing for years,” says Kelly.
But, never one to rest on his laurels, Kelly is pushing the envelope
of environmental design and construction in his latest project, which
has led him to the Hood River Valley – specifically, Clear Creek Road
in Parkdale.
Here, on a one-acre lot in the shadow of Mount Hood, Kelly has spent
the last 18 months building what could be the most
environmentally-friendly home in the state — not only as far as design
and construction materials go, but also in terms of the bigger picture
of environmental impacts that homebuilding has.
Photo courtesy of Neil Kelly Company
The home will be a mountain getaway for
Kelly and his wife, Barbara Woodford, who live in Portland. Kelly also
plans to make the house available for use by Neil Kelly employees.
But the house also serves another purpose.
“This house has been kind of a laboratory,” Kelly says. “We’ve been
able to do more radical things here than what a client might want.”
But Kelly hopes to be able to use what he and his crew have learned in
this laboratory for Neil Kelly clients — and to help push his company
even farther into the green-building movement.
The house was designed by Kelly’s niece, Liz Olberding, an architect
living in Alaska. Every inch of the 2,000-square-foot structure was
planned with energy conservation and sustainability in mind.
The “net zero energy use” house (meaning it is designed to return
energy to the power grid seasonally an equal amount to what it uses)
was built substantially from Durisol block, a wood-and-cement block
with mineral wool insulation. The passive solar design will take
advantage of solar heat gain through large south-facing windows (which
also happen to provide a stunning view of Mount Hood). Two solar
panels that track the sun throughout the day will provide substantial
power to the house, or send it to the power grid if it’s not needed.
Photo courtesy of Neil Kelly Company
In-floor radiant heat throughout the house makes for comfortable and
energy-efficient heat.
Olberding, the architect, didn’t stop with the “standard” eco-friendly
design items. Windows were designed with sloped sills to increase
natural lighting and heat gain. A clerestory with operable windows
brings light into the home’s north side and allows ventilation.
Staggered stud walls, spray-in foam insulation and foot-thick
structural insulated panels on the roof all add to the home’s natural
temperature moderating system.
The design, combined with a state-of-the-art heating and cooling
system (the home is serving as a beta test site for a cold-climate,
two-stage heat pump) is aimed at maintaining a relatively constant
inside temperature with minimal energy-use.
In fact, Kelly says, the home is designed to never drop below 62
degrees even in the heart of winter.
The home’s interior is filled with eco-friendly finishes. The kitchen
is a mini-laboratory within the larger laboratory. Cabinet frames are
made from century-old recycled wood vinegar vats. Cabinet doors are
fashioned from Kirei Board, a wood product made from sorghum stalks.
Countertops are made of Ice Stone, a composite containing 75 percent
recycled glass, and Paper Stone, made from recycled paper.
Photo courtesy of Neil Kelly Company
All of the products use resins that are
free of formaldehyde and are coated with non-toxic finishes.
Erik Churchill, project manager for the home’s construction, says that
one of the most impressive things about the house is actually what is
missing.
“Sometimes the greenest thing you do to a house is what you don’t do
to it,” he says. The concrete block used to build the walls is not
covered with drywall. Ditto the insulated roof panels creating part of
the ceiling in the home’s main room.
Photo courtesy of Neil Kelly Company
But the home itself is not the only
thing that’s green about this project. Kelly set out to make
everything about this endeavor as environmentally-friendly as
possible. To that end, 85 percent of the construction materials used
for the project were sourced within 150 miles of the job site.
Furthermore, deliveries of most materials were done with Neil Kelly’s
delivery truck which runs on 100 percent biodiesel. Churchill’s truck
runs on biodiesel, and Kelly, who has spent countless weekends over
the past year and a half making the trek from Portland to Parkdale to
work on the project, also drives a biodiesel-powered vehicle.
Photo courtesy of Neil Kelly Company
The house is nearly completed and should
be ready to occupy by early summer. It is on track to be the first
LEED-certified residence in the state.
Kelly is pleased with the result —both personally and for how it will
help him bring green building to more of his clients. He sees “going
green” not just as a trendy whim, or a personal preference, but as the
right way to approach business.
“For a business today to be profitable in the long term, we have to be
environmentally-oriented,” Kelly says. “Otherwise we could mess this
earth up so much that it’ll be impossible to restore and this planet
will be flying around empty.”
Kelly’s Parkdale laboratory is proof that building green can be done
literally from the ground up. And, nestled in the woods with Mount
Hood soaring dramatically to its south, the setting is a constant
reminder of why this home is so important.
“We have such an incredible environment here,” Kelly says, “there’s a
bigger motivation to protect it.” |
