Architect puts green principles to work in his own home

ZOE FRALEY

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Back in college, Sean Hegstad's friends used to call him a tree hugger.

But the Bellingham architect sees his green leanings as an asset rather than an epithet.

"Whatever you want to call it, these are sound decisions and good principles," he says, and more people are agreeing. "It's starting to become more mainstream. It's a decision based on priorities instead of a decision based on lifestyle."

| DANNY GAWLOWSKI THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

GREEN TIPS

Architect Sean Hegstad gives these tips for making a remodel or new construction a bit greener.
- Work within an efficient design so that you can use one space for more than one use. This way you can reduce your square footage and your footprint. In Hegstad's home, he combined an office space with his kitchen to keep square footage down.
- Look at window placement to maximize sun so less lighting and heating are required.
- Be creative. Try new materials that are renewable; even something as simple as linoleum or cork instead of vinyl.
- Do your research. Look into how products are made and try to find items - whether furniture, hardware or flooring - that have an aspect of sustainability.
- Make sure items are locally sourced. Buying from a local store is great, but make sure the materials are local as well. His goal is within 500 miles.
- A few places Hegstad suggests for local goods are: Buyer's Market on 2111 Iowa St. and RE Store at 2309 Meridian St., both in Bellingham; Pangaea Natural Stone at 1482 Slater Road in Ferndale.

He put those green principles to work recently when he built a sustainable home for his family in Ferndale.

"It's not just your typical house," he says. "This house has a contemporary, Northwest, Japanese feel."

To make a home with high visual impact but low impact on the environment, Hegstad used local woods such as cedar and alder for decks and floors - this reduces the distance the supplies need to be shipped - as well as sustainably harvested wood around the windows.

He also used sustainable linoleum and cork flooring, as well as radiant heating. And it wasn't just what the home is built with, but where that makes a difference.

"Where we put the house was a really big part of it," he says, adding that it was "where it is gets a lot of sun."

On the street side of the house, windows take up most of the high walls. Below the top windows is what he calls a solar shelf, which intensifies and bounces light that comes through into the rest of the room. And the hallway that leads to the bedrooms of Sean and his wife, Jaimi, and their two children, is illuminated by windows on one side. Hegstad calls this passive solar lighting.

"It doesn't have a system," he says. "It's just a matter of heat coming in through the windows. ...We barely ever have to turn on the lights."

For every season the landscape of the rooms changes with the world outside the windows.

"When it snows it's really beautiful," he says. "You can see it all around. It's like you're in a snow globe."

The Hegstads' home was on the Imagine This! Home and Landscape Tour this June, and he was pleased by the response he got from visitors, especially kids. He heard quite a few tell their parents that they wanted to live in his house. As sustainable building puts itself on the map, it's his hope that more children will have the chance to live in houses like his.

"What's nice is a lot of people are starting to make those decisions," he says. "(They're) thinking about the environment and taking care of (their) piece of it."