Green Acres

Form meets function in the Ojai Hills
6/1/09

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If one came upon it by accident – an unlikely scenario, tucked away as it is on forty acres in the hills south of Ojai – a passer-by would swiftly recognize there’s a different ethic at play in the home of Jakob Bogenberger and Susan Swift. That the home is green is readily apparent, but such is a conclusion at which even the color-blind would arrive in short order.

The surprisingly pragmatic and utilitarian design is the result of a partnership between the homeowners and Ventura architect David Ferrin, who proved well matched to realize an ambitious agenda in home design and construction. The couple intended not only that their home be constructed with cutting-edge materials – facilitating goals in environmentalism, safety and durability – but also from Bogenberger’s own forward-thinking design. In Ferrin’s firm – arketype architects, inc. – they found first a partnership and then a friend, an unusual development in what is typically an arduous process through which most relationships, be they working, friendly or both, don’t survive. Bogenberger laughs at the improbability of his friendship with his architect, noting with wry humor that “Most people who go through construction together get a divorce.” Ferrin echoes the sentiment: “For most people construction is like torture. But Jakob is a scientist – for him life is about learning, so it was a joy to work with him.”

The friendship came in handy for the ambitious project, when the thorough sensibility of the design ran afoul of civil codes that often seemed to confound ‘best practice’ ethics. Originally intended as two abodes – a ‘day house’ and a ‘night house,’ i.e., one for living and working the other for sleeping, dressing and bathing – when construction codes required that the structures become contiguous, they were joined by the glassed-in vestibule that became the foyer.

Such utilitarian separation of space was only the beginning of the home’s departure from mainstream thought in residential development. Unlike many projects, where so-called green design serves little more function than as a marketing tag, this home is green to its veritable roots. The roof, which is curved both to echo the natural form of the surrounding hillside and to buffer sound in the spacious great room of the day house, is covered in amorphous silicone photovoltaic cells – an efficient system that helped bring the home’s electrical bill for all of 2008 down to an astounding thirty dollars.

The walls are comprised of Durisol ICF (insulated concrete form), a cement-bonded wood fiber that is both fire and termite-proof, and finished in permeable lime plaster that allows this home to truly breathe, where traditional construction seals in air and moisture, often to dreadful effect “We lose a liter of water in our sleep every night,” Bogenberger notes, pointing out that the moisture typically has nowhere to go but into the walls, where it stays – resulting indoor air quality issues that broker too-common allergenic nightmares.

The floor is fossil-encrusted Bavarian limestone, a surface that is both aesthetic and serves as an evaporative cooler in the summer, needing only a dash of water to help bring the home’s temperature down. Bogenberger himself laid the tile, an experience he likened to the reading of a book, as each tile yielded a new ‘page’ of biological surprises in the fossilized remnants of the ancient seabed from which it derived.

While the property seems casually landscaped at best, in fact it’s the result of what has been a painstaking process of returning the property back to a natural state, introducing plants that are at once native to the region, generally water and fire smart, and either visually pleasing, edible, or often both – as in the case of the exotic arugula lettuce in the backyard that might on first glance have been mistaken for a weed. Ferrin credits Bogenberger’s hard work and love for biology in the surrounding flora: “There is a year-round remarkability to the the landscape,” he notes. “Jakob’s property is like a botanical garden.”

In a market where green building is too often dismissed as a luxury and where durability is typically neither reckoned nor expected beyond the thirty year span of a home’s financing, this is one green home whose lessons will continue to resound for decades; long enough, one would hope, to see its good sense example become less the too-rare cutting edge than simply the state of the art – in this case, the very fine art of sensible and sustainable living.