Old homestead is ultra-new

Helga Loverseed, The Gazette 



For more than a century, the Packard family has owned land in Ogden. Judge Robert Stanley Weir, who wrote the English words to O Canada, was the first family member to settle on the site - a peninsula jutting out into the southern end of Lake Memphremagog. He bought what had been a small hotel and used it as a summer cottage, naming it Cedarhurst - one of several properties that once encompassed more than 200 hectares.

The current generation of Packards is Weir's great-grandson, Jeff, and his wife, Buffy.

They are Montrealers who recently retired from their jobs in Calgary and own just under half a hectare on this tranquil spot close to the American border. They have built a state-of-the-art eco-house, which from the outside looks as if it dates back to the mid-19th century.

"We wanted to build a truly sustainable property that would leave a small environmental footprint and which would last through several generations," Jeff explained. "At the same time, we were interested in marrying the vernacular architecture of a rural farmhouse in the 1860s with a sustainable design."

The eco-house was constructed between 2008 and 2010, but long before that, the couple made numerous forays around the Eastern Townships, looking for inspiration. One place that particularly caught their fancy was a 19th-century farmhouse with a central gable, flanked by two dormers - elements they have incorporated into their home.

"Jeff started making drawings of the styles we liked," Buffy said. "We eventually came up with our own design, but we did enlist the services of an architect - Jorg Ostrowski in Calgary - who specializes in sustainable buildings."

Ostrowski helped iron out the fine points of constructing the kind of eco-house they wanted, and in memory of Judge Weir's country retreat, the Packards named it Solarhurst. (The old hotel foundations are still visible on their lot.)

The couple's 3,100-squarefoot, three-storey waterfront home encompasses four bedrooms, three bathrooms (one ensuite), a workroom, a screened-in porch, two large balconies and a basement. The building is surrounded by stands of second-growth trees, mostly silver birch and maple.

As its name suggests, Solar-hurst runs on solar power. Eight moving panels at the edge of Lake Memphremagog (they follow the sun to capture energy) and 10 fixed panels on the roof provide electricity. A Finnish masonry heater in the centre of the house supplies heat, with auxiliary warmth coming from an old-fashioned wood stove in the kitchen. (Buffy cooks on it as well.)

"A masonry heater runs on short, hot fires of cordwood," Jeff explained. "The flue gases are routed back down the masonry before exiting the chimney, and when the masonry warms up, it radiates long wavelengths of heat throughout the house."

In the kitchen is a Sun Frost fridge ("it uses around 25 per cent of the energy of a normal fridge") and a gas stove, fuelled by propane. The three bathrooms all have composting toilets, with the waste driven down a chute into the basement. (Filled with tanks, flues and mysterious piping, the basement looks like the engine room of a ship.)

The capital expense involved in building an eco-house is "at least" 75 per cent more than a regular home, according to Jeff, but once that has been absorbed, the operating costs are "minimal." He cites his average monthly expenses as being zero (in the case of electricity and water from a well) or very modest. It costs $23 per month to hire someone to chop wood (from their own lot) for the masonry heater and $60 for propane. Apart from the stove, they need the latter to provide instant hot water and to run the clothes dryer in winter. (In the summer, the couple hang their clothes outside.)

While it is economical to run, building the eco-house was not without its challenges.

"Because this kind of building was outside the norm, it required a great deal of research, patience and experimentation," Jeff said.

"I can't say we had one major problem, but there were certainly tons of little ones."

Jeff cites municipal regulations that required them, for example, to install a septic tank and leach field, even although, due to the composting toilets, they had no "black" water. Another requirement was for the house to be at least 15 metres from the shoreline. Cognizant of the damaging effects of erosion, the Packards actually exceeded that limit, placing the footprint of the building 35 metres back from the lake.

"There are no cookie-cutter approaches to sustainable construction," Jeff said. "Municipal codes are often years and sometimes decades behind advances in science and building techniques."

Having got over the regulatory hurdles, challenges also presented themselves during the actual construction of the house. The Packard family, including the couple's three sons, did much of the donkey work and a Townships contractor - Boynton Construction - provided the hard labour.

Each entranceway had to have a vestibule or a mud room - "an airlock," in the parlance of architect Ostrowski - to prevent heat from either coming in or out of the building, a vital feature for an energy-efficient house. The construction crew had never worked on a sustainable building before, but, according to Jeff, they proved to be excellent problem solvers.

"In construction, it's so important to install things in the right sequence. In the case of the composting toilets, for example, we had to make sure that on each floor they were placed in such a way that the chutes, which carry the waste, were lined up properly. The vents that eliminate odours had to be as straight as possible, with the minimal number of bends. That took a lot of fine tuning."

Jeff freely admits he is the one most interested in the mechanics of the building, while Buffy is responsible for the esthetics. A collector of antiques ("I picked them up in North Hatley, Eastman and at Finnegan's Market in Hudson"), she has furnished the house with handsome old pieces - armoires, a large refectory-style dining table, original artwork and arti-facts (copper pots, wooden carvings, interesting light fixtures) and furniture inherited from her parents, including a wrought iron reading lamp with a cut-out lampshade handcrafted by her mother.

The decor is a soothing blend of earth tones and natural wood. Downstairs, the recycled elm floors are interlocking tongue and groove. The upstairs floors are spruce with tiny spaces in between the planks to make them look as if they have shrunk with age. The beams in the kitchen, sourced from a company in Magog, are roughly textured with the adze marks clearly visible - evidence of the workmanship of a bygone era.

According to the Packards, there are still a few things on their to-do list. They'd like to install a rainwater collection system to augment their well and perhaps a drop-down temporary covering for the screened porch, so they can use it during three seasons.

In the meantime, these avid environmentalists are content with telling one and all about the pros and cons of an eco-building, so much so that they've organized a couple of open houses to show others what they've done. Their website - www.solarhurst.ca - also contains a wealth of information.

