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FeedEco+Elegant
Photo by Peter Ogilvie
A clutter-free kitchen with CaesarStone countertops
What’s greener than a fleet of Priuses and stylish enough for Architectural Digest? It’s Jody Feyas’s and Cara Leigh’s Dream Home, an enviro-project and living space conceptualized, designed, and built by this husband-and-wife design team. Located on a ridge just northwest of the city, the building (whose full, slightly vainglorious name is
The Dream Home: Evolution in Design and Technology) showcases what seems to be every cool ecowidget known to man. If Leigh and Feyas have their way, their perfectly lofty creation will serve as a model for other upscale, earth-friendly homes. To prove it, they’ve been regularly offering public tours and doing more intimate walkthroughs with designers, architects, and builders.
Leigh, an interior designer with her own firm, Interiors, and Feyas, who owns a painting company and works in real estate, are both longtime locals. Together, they spent the past five years making their Dream Home come true—and can recite the properties of the enviro-products that are integrated into the ground-breaking space. From the super-efficient radiant-heated concrete and cork floors to the dimable fluorescent ceiling lights (a new T-5 low-wattage technology), this is a place that would do Al Gore proud. “The whole idea here was to be able to illustrate that green can be contemporary and elegant,” Leigh says. “It doesn’t have to be recycled Coke bottles in the walls. For luxury-level clients, we need to appeal to the people living in the McMansions, to get them to consider incorporating more green products into their homes.” Basically, when they couldn’t find others to showcase these revolutionary products, they simply built a home and did it themselves.
Walking through the house, Leigh acts as a kind of enviro-docent. The doors, she says, feature recycled agrifibre cores with white oak (renewable) on the surface. Some bathroom fixtures are made from recycled scrap-heap metal, and the gorgeous plaster finish on the walls, from the Albuquerque-based company American Clay, is comprised of all-organic materials, including ground oyster shells and natural clay. Outside, a permeable, synthetic grass with recycled content (complete with little brown bits to make it look real) covers one courtyard, and plants are watered via an irrigation system (from Santa Fe’s The Firebird) that monitors the atmosphere before deciding when to release more drops. The walls and ceiling are filled with a new-to-market, climate-specific insulation system from Guardian Industries, in which a closed-cell foam is sprayed in first, then topped with blown-in fiberglass to maintain loft, unlike standard fiberglass batting, thus keeping the house airtight and more energy efficient. The list goes on:
heat you can control via the Internet; a boiler that adjusts itself according to the outdoor temperature; electronically controlled window shades that adjust on timers set to maximize heat and light by the season (installed and programmed by the local company Constellation Home Electronics); and a dual-control low-flow toilet that lets you choose either .9 or 1.6 gallons per flush.
Going green wasn’t cheap—Leigh estimates the specialized materials cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more than conventional construction would have, and she spent 
more than two years researching the market and to get beyond many a green-washing claim. Yet by working out marketing deals with manufacturers, (“‘The Southwest!’” Leigh remembers some green companies telling her. “‘We’ve been dying to get into that market.’”), she was able to get reduced prices and sometimes complimentary items not yet seen in Santa Fe. “It’s definitely a give-give, win-win situation,” she says. “We want to educate people, help them make the right decisions. But it has to be in the right environment.”
Leigh and Feyas began the project by first defining a few terms. What does it mean to be green? Feyas identified four principles—the use of renewable resources, maximizing energy efficiency (including what’s called “embodied energy,” or how much fuel it takes to get a product to its destination), durability (avoiding things that will end up in the landfill in a few years), and indoor air quality (organic trumps toxic). Next, the couple figured out how to orient the house, siting it to take advantage of summer winds and solar gain. Finally, after contacting suppliers both locally and from around the world, they chose the greenest luxury materials available.
The home’s website (yes, the house has its own website) at www.thedreamhome.info includes a room-by-room description of its products: a painted-on exterior coating by EnviroCoatings that creates a thermal barrier for higher energy efficiency; Fisher and Paykel’s energy-saving washer, dryer, and dishwasher; CaesarStone countertops that are non-porous, easy to clean, and require no toxic sealants; the master bath steam shower that uses just 1.5 gallons of water for a 30-minute spritz. Plus, the pair supported area businesses whenever possible, including products from the Good Water Company, Santa Fe Hardware, Counterpoint Tile, mosaic artist Erin Adams, Moss, and Modern Outdoor Furniture Company.
Some of the Dream Home gadgetry isn’t green, just cool, like the bathroom mirror that, with a press of a button, offers up a television screen, or the stereo system that rocks any room in the house, including the mod home theater space. It’s like a mini World’s Fair for eco-building, a showcase for the latest hi-tech gizmos and visionary thinking. And while Leigh and Feyas still depend on the electric grid for power—their plan for solar panels was rejected because of aesthetic restrictions, says Leigh—they expect their energy costs to be between 25 and 40 percent less than those for a new house of comparable size (about 2,800 square feet, plus garage). At its coming-out party last August at the Parade of Homes, the house won the Gold Merit Award for Excellence in Green Building and the Judges Award for Outstanding Innovation and Technology.
Despite the couple’s planning and attention to earth-friendly detail, some environmentalists might scoff: How can a $1 million-plus home for two people be considered anything but self-indulgent? But Larry Gorman, who runs the Albuquerque-based energy-efficiency company Building Energy Solutions, calls it “ahead of the curve in a lot of respects.” He contextualizes the project as part of a bigger eco-housing movement. “People have criticized it. ‘Can a house that size be green?’ But my thought is that people will build houses whatever size they want,” he says. “And it’s better to build green than not.”
With the urgency of climate change becoming more obvious, the green building stakes are high. Environmentalists have put most of their focus on automobiles, which actually emit just 13 percent of harmful greenhouse gases. The heating, cooling, and powering of homes, on the other hand, contribute 48 percent. New Mexico is already on the leading edge of earth-friendly. The state offers the nation’s most generous green-home tax credits, more than $22,000 per house, which can offset much of the costs for upping the green ante. Albuquerque recently instituted green building mandates, and Santa Fe’s are in the works. Several enviro-residential developments are already under construction, including Santa Fe’s Oshara Village. Architecture 2030, an international initiative that seeks to make all new buildings on the planet carbon neutral—emitting no greenhouse gasses—by 2030, is based in Santa Fe, spearheaded by local visionary Edward Mazria. This June, Santa Fe hosts the 46th annual International Making Cities Livable Conference. Plus, many of the world’s solar pioneers and eco-friendly builders started in our region. Within this larger framework, the Dream Home serves as a glamorous icon of broader green-building efforts in the Land of Enchantment. “Most construction does not take advantage of our local assets including solar energy and local building materials,” says Katherine Mortimer, the chair of the Santa Fe Green Team, which steers the city’s sustainability efforts. “If we have to require people to build smarter and reduce their heating and cooling costs in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and hault global warming, then that’s what we have to do.”
Still, the challenges facing green building remain substantial. Contractors have neither the resources nor the motivation to research new products, and most Americans fail to grasp the scope of our environmental crisis. Even in the post-Inconvenient Truth era, gas-guzzling SUV sales remain robust. Leigh tells of one Dream Home visitor who was surprised to find the place wasn’t the color green. And Feyas points to what he calls the American Dilemma: a compulsive need to possess things that are bigger, faster, and shinier than what’s next door. “We’ve created this standard of living that is wasteful, where we all want to have more than is necessary,” he says—like that 48-inch
subzero fridge when really, something smaller would do.
By making green sexy, Leigh and Feyas hope to encourage more sustainable building in our city’s still-explosive high-end real estate market. “Hippie design just doesn’t work for everyone,” Leigh says. “There is a huge divide, with people who are taking the bulk of our valuable resources looking at what is considered green and saying, ‘I don’t want to live in that.’ These are people who have the resources to be green. … [The Dream Home] shows things that help your house function better and make your living experience better.”
“You don’t have to go crazy like we did,” adds Feyas. “Our house is about the luxury market, but on any level, with a bit of research, you can do a lot. … Lower-end construction is actually where many of the real innovations, the breakthroughs, and the most interesting aspects of green building are happening. And it’s where the government could enforce efficiency through mandates.”
That’s already happening. Soon, most new houses in our state will be required to be more efficient and less toxic. Maybe, just maybe, this cozy green future could be more than a dream.
