W Residence

Location
2822 N. Kedzie Map

Owner
Brian Warling & Lisa Wright

Architect
John Joyce Architects

The W Residence is a gut rehab and third-floor addition to an existing 2-story building with storefront space into a single live-work space, with Warling Studios on the first floor, offices for the studio and Red Bird Visual on a portion of the second floor, and residential space in the remainder. This is a project with a modest budget that is attempting to maximize green for their dollar with everyday, low-tech solutions.

My favorite aspect of this project is that the owners have established a website to share their experience with others. They clearly recognize the challenge and lack of quality information available for those doing green on a budget, and want others to benefit from what they learn along the way. There's a blog, including a friendly post regarding the project's interaction with yours truly.

The only visibly green feature of this project is a green roof. Most of the remaining deliberately green features are in the project's energy efficiency, including highly insulated walls (up to R-30 soy-based insulation), a high-efficiency furnace and air conditioner, and Energy Star lighting. The overall project is seeking an Energy Star rating, which is essentially a requirement for any small residential project to legitimately call itself green.

The live/work nature of this project is also an obvious green contributor that won't show up in most green checklists. It's interesting to see more and more homeowners returning to housing patterns that were common 100 years ago. If you have some good links on discussion of this trend please share!

This project also uses all steel studs which lead to an interesting green discussion. Again, this doesn't usually appear in prescriptive green checklists such as Built Green Colorado or the less-stringent NAHB Green Guidelines. These checklists tend to be very focused on how to make wood framing as green as possible (various techniques to reduce amount of lumber, use sustainably harvested and engineered wood products, etc.). However, there are some professionals, including the architect for this project and the friendly folks at Greenmaker, that argue steel studs are preferable to wood because of their recycled content, recyclability, and ease of deconstruction and reuse. Seems reasonable but I haven't seen a detailed investigation of this - again feel free to share if you have.

Interior demolition began last month and the project is expected to be complete next year.