New house in Vancouver seeks to face the ‘Living Building Challenge’

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From the outside, it looks like any other modern West Coast home.

What passersby don’t see are two tanks buried under the driveway that can store 35,000 liters of collected rainwater, enough to flush toilets and water the garden. On the roof and backyard trellis, an extensive solar panel system feeds excess energy to the grid.

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In a recent blog mailBC Hydro asked if this custom-built 5,400-square-foot home in Vancouver’s Kerrisdale area could be the greenest in Canada.

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That remains to be seen, but the owner and builders intend for it to meet some of the strictest standards for evaluating a building’s sustainability. It will take more than a year to collect data on energy and water use before we know if the home qualifies to meet the Living Building Challenge guidelines set by the International Living Future Institute, a nonprofit in Portland, Oregon. .

The stipulations include generating at least five percent more electricity than is used in a year and being able to operate essential services for seven days without power from the grid. There is a long list of toxic chemicals and materials that cannot be used, and a requirement that at least 25 percent of the site be used to grow food.

“It’s a really ambitious project,” said Arthur Lo, owner and founder of Vancouver-based Insightful Healthy Homes, which designed and built the home.

The house is divided into six levels to accommodate a three-generation family living together. Design and planning took two years to complete, and construction took more than six years, Lo said.

Other projects that have passed the Living Building Challenge (or parts of it) are libraries and rooms on academic campuses, buildings for large foundations and companies in the United States, Australia and Europe.

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In BC, there are two examples, one at the VanDusen Botanical Garden building in Vancouver and the other at the UniverCity Child Care Center on Burnaby Mountain.

There are fewer residential homes on the list: on Bainbridge Island, in seattle and in Edmonds in Washington state, in Fold, Mineral.,Saint Anthony and Austin in Texas, and Ann Arbor in Michigan. In BC, there is only one example of a residential project, a Family home in Cowichan Bay on Vancouver Island.

For example, to qualify for the full Living Build Challenge, there is a requirement that a parcel of land equal to the size of the site be set aside or funded through a habitat exchange program.

Lo has talked to the owners about the possibility of donating money to a land trust. They have not yet committed to this and in this case, there is also the argument that a house existed on this city lot, while other projects seeking to meet this requirement are located on large lots that have never been developed.

Lo declined to give a ballpark figure for the Kerrisdale project, but said this type of undertaking requires a lot of money.

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In 2011, his company built a home in Burnaby that was the first in BC to be net-zero certified. He thinks investing in expensive, one-off projects can lead to new and better practices that can be affordable.

Dan Butler, construction manager for Insightful Healthy Homes, said the project allowed them to push for sustainable alternatives, and while suppliers initially opposed the requests, they later became interested.

Lo said that to reduce overall carbon in the home’s materials, the exterior is clad with wood reclaimed from the frame of the 1930s home originally on the property, in addition to three other projects the company was developing.

“I always say that the bones of the old house became the skin of the new house,” Lo said.

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