NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
Using recycled building materials, a Newbury couple built cheaper and better and then added solar heat as a bonus.
Lisa Dorval and David Hall’s Newbury house is not your typical family home. There’s the double-height corrugated-metal ceiling, the boulder 2 feet thick and 10 feet in diameter that serves as a hearth, the swing hanging from an industrial trolley moving along a steel beam, and the rust-colored buffed-concrete floor. But within those vaulting spaces are child-friendly play areas, a highly functional kitchen, cozy places to read, watch TV, or play music, and inviting views of the surrounding woods and salt marshes, all of which make the dramatic structure comfortably livable for the couple and their three children.
The structure is also representative of Dorval and Hall’s commitment to living and building green. The house is heated with solar technology and substantially built from recycled materials. To Dorval, a psychotherapist, and Hall, a real estate developer whose best-known project is The Tannery in downtown Newburyport, the use of salvaged materials is as important as reducing fossil-fuel use.
It also makes for some unique construction: A 40-by-60-foot prefabricated metal structure, more commonly used for commercial buildings, encloses a dwelling made with granite recycled from the Pru and structural steel reclaimed from a Boston Whaler plant.
Once the truss-system frame was erected, the exterior walls were stick-built and sheathed with pine; the roof is a sandwich of corrugated-metal ceiling and insulation covered by galvanized steel. This shell cost about $30 per square foot.
“We knew the exterior would be barnlike,” says Keith Moskow, a Boston architect who helped his friends Dorval and Hall design the house. “A new McMansion sort of building would look out of place in rural Newbury, but barns fit right in. We adjusted the pitch of the roof to look more traditional. The design process was backward. Normally, you design a house, and then you acquire the building materials. Here, David had a kit of parts, and we collaborated on the design, based on those parts.”
Both at home and in his business, Hall loves to use salvaged materials. “You can get exceptional quality at an absurd price,” he says. “Our 16-inch heavy-gauge stainless-steel stovepipe, for example, would have cost $1,000 new. We paid a couple of hundred bucks, and the quality of steel we have simply isn’t available for the domestic house market. The hanging light fixture in the front hall is a contractor’s mistake meant for a rest area on Route 495. We bought granite slabs when they redesigned the Prudential Center; we paid $1,000 instead of $40,000. And all the interior doors are made from hard-pine wide boards that were originally inside the Newburyport High School.”
In addition to good value and reducing waste, he adds, you get history. “The trolley that our kids love to swing on was used to carry the Boston Whalers through the factory as they were being built.”
Winter warmth comes from passive solar heat gained via south-facing windows. There is also radiant heat in the concrete floor that uses hot water from a thermal-solar system in a metal shed in the front yard. Originally a shipping container, the shed houses a water tank heated by an array of glass vacuum tubes mounted on its roof.
“These tubes are the reason we have consistent solar heat in cloudy New England,” Hall says. “The technology didn’t exist until very recently. It has enabled us to do without an oil burner, which would use about 1,000 gallons a year to heat a house of this size.”
Another energy saver is the metal ceiling, which bounces heat and light back down into the house. Interior walls are finished in gently mottled shades of terra cotta and red, the pigments mixed right into the plaster.
Now that the house is finished, there’s only one thing Dorval would change. “We don’t really need so much space,” she says. “But it’s great for the kids – they can run, play, skateboard, and roller skate inside.”
That’s when Jacob, 14, Ella, 11, and Emmett, 7, are not swinging out over the living room from that factory trolley.
“Dave practices what he preaches,” says Moskow. “We all try to do that, but Dave and Lisa really live out their principles.” 