Green Pioneers
Noe Valley spec house touts conservation, including rain catchment system

Susan Fornoff, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, April 22, 2006

Even before its buyers move in, a new Noe Valley home touted by its builders as "the greenest house in San Francisco" is bringing down some walls -- in San Francisco's Department of Building Inspection, that is.

The 2,600-square-foot house on Clipper Street showcases every high-end Earth-friendly feature that Lorax Development partners Mike Kerwin, Joel Micucci and Pat Loughran could find a way to incorporate, including the city's first approved rooftop rain catchment system. The system, by Mount Shasta's Wonderwater Inc., collects an average of 18,000 to 20,000 gallons of annual rainfall, cleans it and stores it in tanks below the house to be used to flush toilets, wash clothes and water gardens.

Wonderwater president and founder Dylan Coleman notes that his rain harvesting systems perfect a practice that is 3,000 years old, but, he said, "There hasn't exactly been a flood of activity," in part because city permit boards don't know what to make of it.

On a rainy day in San Francisco, he said, 465 million gallons of rain goes into city sewers, to be treated as sewage -- a practice Coleman says is "stupid, and it's a waste of energy."

"I see a day in San Francisco when you can't get a permit unless you collect a certain amount of water, and when you are charged for excess runoff," Coleman said. "But right now there's some real political stuff out there, and it might just go case by case until we get things going."

The Lorax team won a permit variance for the $18,000 Noe Valley system, but that doesn't mean anybody else will. Robert Farrow, the city's new chief plumbing inspector, confirmed in an interview both San Francisco's commitment to green practices and his department's lack of policy on rain harvesting.

"From the mayor's office on down, San Francisco is big on conservation, whether it's water or energy, and we want to push for that result," said Farrow, who has been on the job three weeks and wasn't familiar with rain catchment until The Chronicle's query on the Noe house prompted him to investigate. "This is in line with that, and I think it's a good idea.

"But it needs to be looked at by other departments in the city -- Health, Building, Planning all need to be heard from before we form a strict policy on this. I don't know where this is going to go in terms of policy, but it's high on my list for our next meeting of managers."

City concerns, Farrow said, would include "natural fallout from the air -- from exhaust or chemicals -- that makes the water unsafe for drinking," plus cross-contamination with the drinking water supply or with the municipal water supply. Kerwin said he and his partners wiped sweat off their brows when recently retired chief plumbing inspector Dennis King applied those concerns to their application and said, "no" and "no" and finally "yes" last year.

"In the back of my mind I was thinking thank God, because the tanks were already installed and collecting water," Kerwin said. "It would have been a major problem had they not let us do it. We'd have had to cut them in half and make six hot tubs out of them."

Surely they'd have found some good use for them -- it's the modus operandi of 5-year-old Lorax, named after the Dr. Seuss character who declares, "I speak for the trees." Kerwin had been in advertising and design until his company, Spike Design, boomed and busted with the dot-coms.

"I decided that I needed to work with my hands and my mind and decided to find a property that I could remodel into a solar home, with a goal to someday build something from scratch that utilized every green material and technology available to me," he said. "That is when I ran into Pat and Joel in late 2001. They were each doing remodeling projects and looking for the same type property and shared my vision."

As if to verify that their motivation was green principles, not green paper, the three went out and lost money on their first Earth-friendly house when it cost them nearly $400 a square foot to build.

The Noe Valley house, on the former site of a crumbling asphalt parking pad, cost closer to $350 a square foot, Kerwin said. He feels that's still high and indicates that saving energy still requires spending money; however, one architect said $300 to $400 a square foot is not out of line for high-quality construction in San Francisco, and a 2003 analysis by the U.S. Green Building Council estimates that "an upfront investment of 2 percent in green building design, on average, results in life cycle savings of 20 percent of the total construction costs -- more than 10 times the initial investment."

The architect of this project, John Maniscalco, situated the four-bedroom, four-bathroom layout to maximize air and light flow, keeping the personal spaces on the small side but opening the main living space, downstairs family room and upstairs master bedroom to the scenic rear views. Then the Lorax fellows did their thing. Among the features they researched, embraced and now tout as "green":

-- Solar panels on the roof to generate electricity and produce the hot water that circulates through Warmboard, a subfloor system providing radiant heat to the whole house.

-- The Terra Mai floors, a Lorax "labor of love," Kerwin said, are salvaged 100-year-old railroad ties from Southeast Asia that were shipped to Shasta and roughly milled. The partners then laid the floor and plugged all of the holes with leftover sawdust and putty. Considering the amount of fuel it took to move the wood here and there, this is probably the least "green" feature of the house; visually, however, it's stunning.

-- Kitchen cabinets and built-ins are made of Forestry Stewardship Council certified wood, with cherry veneer over wheat board boxes; door fronts contain no formaldehyde and even that plastic at the back of the built-ins is a natural product, eco-resin.

-- The Richlite kitchen counter -- what, no granite? -- withstands all kinds of abuse in college chemistry labs. It's made of treated paper from responsibly managed forests.

-- Ultra Touch Natural Cotton Fiber Insulation is carcinogen-free because it's made from natural denim and cotton fibers. "This stuff, you can rub on your face," Kerwin said.

-- Hardie Fiber Cement Siding carries a 50-year warranty, as does the exterior trim material, Azek cellular PVC. Is it really green to use products that can never break down? "When the time comes that we recycle smarter," Kerwin said, "we'll be able to salvage this and reuse it, and it'll still be in great shape."

-- Trex composite decking material trimmed with forest-certified ipe railings looks great on the main floor terrace. Trex is made of reclaimed lumber and plastic, with no toxic preservatives; unlike other "green" building materials, Kerwin said, it's become widely available in many looks.

-- A mix of 40 percent fly ash, a hard-to-dispose-of power plant byproduct, strengthens the concrete foundation and slab.

-- Carpets are hemp, colored with vegetable dyes. Paints and caulks are low-VOC acrylics. Windows and doors have low E coatings to reduce heat loss.

"You see a lot of houses marketed as green, but how much of it really is green?" said cabinetmaker Karin De Gier, owner of Zwanette Design. "As I've seen this project develop over time, I've become more and more impressed by Lorax's willingness to go the extra mile to find more innovative and sustainable materials. The greatest thing, of course, is the water catchment system."

Visitors to a series of open houses in March probably were more taken with De Gier's cherry cabinets, the eye-catching floors, dual staircases offering separate access to the master suite and the two other second-floor bedrooms, which are connected by a bathroom. After all, a green house that wasn't good looking could not have attracted two offers in excess of its $1.89 million asking price, as this one did.

The new owners -- a family with three children -- were scheduled to close the sale by Friday. For them, the under-the-stairs wine cellar and the basement family room opening into the landscaped garden with a mature tree probably held more appeal than the water catchment system.

Naturally, Northern California's crazy spring has filled the tanks, which flush themselves automatically; a French drain under the yard insures against overflow emergencies. The Wonderwater systems cost from $5,000 to $20,000, Coleman said, depending on property size and system capability; one family of four in Northwest Washington state, he said, is getting all of its household water for the year, including for drinking, from the winter rains.

They've got a lot of land.

"For downtown homes, there's usually room only for non-potable use," Coleman said.

That's got to come as a relief to city policymakers not prepared to weather a storm of permit applications, not to mention competition in the drinking water market. But like the Lorax's soul mate Kermit said, it's not easy being green.

E-mail Susan Fornoff at sfornoff@sfchronicle.com .

©2006 San Francisco Chronicle