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green within reach
Paul Allen Green Built Homes challenges the idea that green building carries a hefty price tag by offering affordable family homes high on energy efficiency and low on environmental impact.
A shady covered porch leads the way into Paul Allen Green Built Homes’ featured house in the 2009 Homes of Enchantment Parade. The welcoming area enhances homeowners’ use of the front yard while encouraging a greater sense of community in the neighborhood.
Down the hall, the spacious great room opens to a covered back porch. Green design and building features increase the home’s performance in every room, impacting everything from energy and water savings to comfortable temperatures and air quality.
Stacked stone, a tiled floor, and a wood-trimmed ceiling accent the formal dining room adjacent to the living room at the front of the house.
Overlooking the great room, the roomy eat-in kitchen features a tile backsplash and raised-panel birch cabinetry.
Off of the great room, the master bedroom leads through solid-wood, hand-stained double doors to the master bath. The design and construction techniques that go into a home like this one, certified at Build Green New Mexico’s Gold level, means high performance levels and lower operating costs.
This article first appeared in Autumn 2009 Su Casa
Tidy rows of houses on Albuquerque’s west side mark the start of a new neighborhood. From the street, the homes exude thoughtful design and livability, from the stone and wood details and varied rooflines to the shaded entryways and inviting banco-lined front porches that beckon for morning coffee or twilight chats with the neighbors.
A fundamental draw for these homes, however, has nothing to do with their curb appeal. What you don’t see on the surface is that the homes were designed and constructed to the highest standards of green building. And beyond what you don’t see is what you’d never guess—these new green homes are priced from $129,900 to the mid-$200,000s.
A Featured Builder in this year’s Homes of Enchantment Parade, Paul Allen Green Built Homes offers more than an emerging neighborhood at its Pine Mesa Estates community within Saltillo on Albuquerque’s west side. It provides another indication that green building has left the fringe and is extending its influence on Albuquerque’s production-home market.
“We really are doing something that no one else is doing,” says owner Rex Wilson. “We’re extremely excited.”
Rex Paul Wilson and general operations manager Robert Allen Lupton formed Paul Allen Green Built Homes three years ago, combining their middle names to create an identity for the business. Armed with their experience in custom home building, production building, developing, and remodeling, the men set out to create high-performance, aesthetically pleasing houses that are also affordable.
The environmental mission so central to the company today came six months into the design process, when Wilson showed the plans to his 24-year-old daughter. This is great, she said, but will the homes be green? When Wilson replied that building green is too expensive, his daughter posed a simple question that inspired a new direction for the company—how do you know?
Challenging the prevailing perception that a green home is an expensive home, Wilson and Lupton investigated how they could construct environmentally sensitive houses at affordable prices. For two years, the Paul Allen Homes team designed eco-friendly, resource-conscious, energy- and water-efficient houses using proven green-building methods—all while meeting their target price point.
a new market for green
Up front, Wilson made the decision to work on a smaller profit margin to effectively break into the market with lean, green homes. “With us, green is not a code word for expensive,” he says. “It’s a code word for high performance and high value.” If he were to compare the company’s product to cars, he says a Paul Allen home would get 80 miles to a gallon.
“There are a lot of builders who throw around green casually,” Wilson adds, but Paul Allen Green Built homes are certified by Build Green New Mexico or LEED for Homes, reputable programs that demand documentation and third-party testing to verify home performance. These third-party inspections and tests throughout construction are critical components of the process, which includes a final inspection and testing at the completion of each individual home prior to certification. All Paul Allen homes are also Energy Star certified. These certifications let the owner know that the house was designed and constructed for a range of specific environmental and health considerations and built well above code requirements.
Homes in the company’s Paul Allen Signature Series, which includes its featured house in the Homes of Enchantment Parade, are planned for Build Green New Mexico’s highest Emerald certification or LEED for Homes’ Platinum certification. The eight plans in this line are priced from $169,000 to $239,000. Home sizes range from 1,050 to 2,100 square feet.
The company’s Green Start line features homes certified Gold by Build Green New Mexico for $149,000 to $169,000. The line’s three plans range in size from 1,010 to 1,327 square feet. The Green Start series offers fewer amenities than the Paul Allen line but boasts the same high construction standards.
Paul Allen Homes’ new HeadStart line offers its most affordable homes to date, with three plans priced from $129,000 to $166,000. Homes in this line are available from 1,000 to 1,613 square feet and are planned for certification at Build Green New Mexico’s Bronze level.
Paul Allen Homes’ reasonable square footage offerings contribute to the houses’ small carbon footprints, bringing environmental consciousness to the designs without sacrificing comfortable livability. The homes “walk big,” Wilson says, thanks to well-defined spaces and angles in the floor plans that enhance their perceived size. Additional square footage in the form of covered porches maximizes living space without adding to heating and cooling costs.
The homes are built using green design and construction techniques that have demonstrated high performance levels for a substantial period of time—nothing is experimental or unproven, according to Wilson, who is quick to point out that an isolated factor like energy-efficient appliances doesn’t make a home green. Rather, a truly green home is conceptualized as an integrated system, starting with its design.
This educational aspect is important to Paul Allen Homes. The first step in Wilson and Lupton’s process is to personally teach potential home buyers what it means to build green. “We want the customers to deal with the owners and management directly,” says Wilson, who shares ownership in the company with Lupton and chief financial officer Sherri Repichowski. “We’re with them through the entire building process.” Paul Allen Homes invites customers to come out each weekend during the four months while their home is under construction to observe and understand the green-building experience.
The company encourages education on the real estate side, as well, by offering free Green Team training sessions for members of the local real estate community. From the consumer’s standpoint, the Multiple Listing Service now indicates homes’ green-built status—a benefit to Paul Allen homeowners when it’s time to sell.
the meaning of green
The company’s price points and certification levels certainly stand out from the crowd. But Wilson and Lupton stress that even after the initial home purchase, living in a house built to these green standards means significant energy and water savings that translate into lower operating costs for the life of the home.
Paul Allen Homes constructs tightly sealed building envelopes with generous insulation values in the walls, foundation, and ceiling. Icynene foam insulation in the attic equates to an R-40 insulation value overhead. The 2x6 walls come in at the equivalent of an R-23 insulation value, while low-E windows minimize heat transfer. This snug construction makes indoor air quality particularly important, so a ventilation system exhausts all air in the house six to seven times a day with Panasonic WhisperGreen fans.
Heating and cooling ducts run through conditioned space and are wrapped with additional insulation, and the furnace itself has a 95 percent efficiency rating. All together, utility costs in a Paul Allen home work out to about $2 per day, according to Wilson—and these homes have refrigerated air. (Visit paulallenhomes.net to see a video demonstrating some of the company’s green-building techniques.)
The homes’ smart energy- and water-saving solutions include compact fluorescent lighting, Energy Star appliances, low-flow plumbing fixtures, and tankless water heaters placed near the point of use, to name a few. Even the homes’ basic building blocks meet green criteria. Working with area suppliers, Paul Allen Homes selects high-quality, long-lasting materials that are low impact to manufacture, using local and recycled materials whenever possible.
a model example
All of these elements come together in Paul Allen Green Built Homes’ featured Homes of Enchantment Parade model. Low-water-use landscaping designed by a LEED-certified landscape architect greets visitors in front, where the hip roof, stacked stone, and wooden corbels enhance the home’s architectural appeal. Perhaps most striking from outside at 10808 Saltillo Street NW is the home’s inviting front porch. Beyond providing an additional living space for owners to enjoy, Wilson believes that these porches and outdoor bancos help create a greater sense of community.
Once inside, the comfortable floor plan opens to the formal living room and adjoining dining room, a space beautifully appointed with stacked stone accents, solid-wood crown molding, and a slatted tongue-and-groove ceiling. The area demonstrates one option for the flex room Paul Allen Homes incorporates in its floor plans. The room can be used as a dining room (as shown in the featured home), a bedroom, or even an extra bath. In all, the featured home measures 2,100 square feet with an additional 500 square feet of porch space.
Past the living and dining spaces, a hallway leads to a wing containing two bedrooms and a bath. Around the corner, the spacious eat-in kitchen connects with the great room, which has a fireplace and access to the backyard and its covered porch. Continue through the great room to the master suite, which features a garden tub and generous walk-in closet.
Paul Allen Homes clearly considers the details, both aesthetic and functional. Thoughtfully placed lighted nichos enhance the home’s contemporary Southwestern design. Inside the finished garage—roomy enough to accommodate larger vehicles so they don’t have to park outside—a switch controls an outdoor outlet near the home’s roofline specifically designed for plugging in Christmas lights. A built-in pesticide system eliminates spraying inside the home.
This featured model showcases many of the upgrades from which Paul Allen homeowners can choose—custom oil-rubbed bronze hardware, solid-wood hand-stained interior doors, raised-panel birch cabinetry, DuPont Corian countertops, stacked stone accents, and slate tile. The home has a base price of $239,900. As shown, its sales price comes to $279,900.
The company demonstrates a range of three “good, better, best” interior finish selections in its existing models so buyers can get a sense of the different home designs and surface choices. Consistent with its goals of value and affordability, Paul Allen Homes offers these upgrades at builder cost so buyers can customize their homes without foregoing the options they want, Wilson says. At the on-site design center, buyers can select everything from tile and carpet to doors and countertops, choosing from options like high-pressure laminate, tile, Corian, and granite.
Paul Allen Green Built Homes’ quality-oriented, value-conscious approach is proving successful. Phase one of the company’s 100-house Pine Mesa Estates community within Saltillo is on track to sell out by the end of the year, Wilson says. A fitting site for Paul Allen’s environmentally conscious houses, the community sits within close proximity to recently added Westside infrastructure including schools, shopping, and a bike path to the Rio Grande and downtown Albuquerque. According to Wilson, the company has plans for three additional communities in Northwest Albuquerque and is considering building on customers’ individual sites.
In the end, the company’s progress relates back to Wilson and Lupton’s mission to build livable, efficient, eco-friendly houses at affordable prices. Whether a home costs $149,000 or $250,000, it’s the biggest investment a person is likely to make in his or her life, Wilson explains, and he believes that person deserves the best. For Paul Allen Green Built Homes, this means offering high-quality houses that consider the environment as well as the homeowner.
“We didn’t want to be sort of green,” Wilson says. “We wanted to be the real deal. And we are.”