Green Building Elements

Restaurants here in San Francisco open, and close, almost as often as the fog rolls in so we don’t usually pay an extreme amount of our precious attention to another restaurant du jour. Mixt Greens recently opened but they don’t qualify for new kid on the block status nonetheless they do deserve green props. Thus I direct my attention to their third installment of the Mixt Greens empire.

This third location, located in SoMa, just opened and used zero-VOC paints to improve the air quality, and I could definitely smell the food and not the fumes. They even used recycled paint to cover their ceiling. I didn’t find any bamboo or cork for the flooring but something better as they used an unfinished concrete floor with 50% flyash content. That high flyash content along with the fact that the floor will last a long time (plus it’s easy to clean) makes that choice a no-brainer. Read the rest of this entry »

As I walked around last year’s Kitchen and Bath Industry Show in Las Vegas, I asked where I could find the green products. I was encouraged to put on my walking shoes and make the trek to a minor hall where I found about twenty square feet devoted to five or six products that left little impression on me. Much has changed, it seems, in only one year. Green is the buzzword at this year’s show, helped in no small part by the host city, Chicago, showing off its green-ness through LEED building projects going up within sight of the convention center. Just about every booth displayed information on how green their products were. “Green building has become the spark that has added some life to this industry,” a representative from MasterBrand Cabinets told me.

Water saving innovators Kohler and TOTO made green the focus of their booths, proudly displaying the Watersense stickers on their high efficiency toilets. TOTO, who recycles 100% of their china, has developed a universal toilet bowl whose tank can be interchanged from a 1.6 gallon per flush to a 1.28 gpf e-tank. Read the rest of this entry »

Daahling you look fab and Green. That’s what people may be saying after experiencing treatments in San Francisco’s eco-chic Epi Center MedSpa. Yes, the whole concept sounds soooo Los Angeles to me, too. Some of us don’t even get the whole mani-pedi thing so it might take a little coaxing to have some lipo or botox thing, even at this truly green spa. A facial might not be for all of us but we’re positively glowing when it comes to the soon to be certified LEED interior.

The Epi Center MedSpa will open its doors in April to commemorate both its 10th anniversary and Earth Day. We’re impressed with the project and the creative Green help, namely SF-based Organic Architect, Eric Corey Freed, (who’s now part of the literati with the recently released Green Building and Remodeling for Dummies), Eco-Fabulous founder and style guru Zem Joaquin who served as the “green style police,” and lead architect Justin Martinkovic.

Even though the spa isn’t quite finished we can see the Greenness with evidenced by the fact that the construction team lacks the surgeon-looking masks that can be seen on many construction jobs to protect from toxic substances and dust. Why? The air scrubber being used (see photo) maintains the healthy air quality on the site and keeps dusts and dangerous particles, the HEPA filter for tiny particles, and a charcoal filter for fumes and odors. Enough filters for ya?

Besides the whole clean air thing, the spa includes eco-creativity. I like that instead of using wood or bamboo panels the crew utilized recycled newspaper panels that they stained, sanded and cut into the ceiling panels. They went cradle to cradle by using carpet from Bentley Prints and natural tapped rubber for the cushions, which do not offgas and biodegrade. And even though they used marble, the fact they used recycled marble flooring and countertops, gave me reason to smile. Thank goodness that the powers that be decided on water filters versus those annoying unsustainable small plastic water bottles that so many spas offer.

Maybe now I’ll feel a little better about that tuck.

Today’s news included the story that testing on FEMA-supplied temporary housing trailers in Mississippi and Louisiana has found extremely high levels of formaldehyde in the air, despite earlier reports issued by FEMA indicating that there was no problem.

Tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on more than 500 trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi showed formaldehyde levels that were five times higher than levels in a normal house. The levels in some trailers were nearly 40 times what is normal.

The CDC is saying that people living in these trailers “should move out quickly — especially children, the elderly and anyone with asthma or another chronic condition.”

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Most of the country is paying for heat right now. Being on the Gulf Coast, I wasn’t until this week – but with temps dropping into the twenties Fahrenheit, I’m starting to rethink the location of my home office.

You see, my house is like the one shown (from a real estate ad). Mine was also originally built with a porch, which was later enclosed with walls and permanent windows. When I open the real front door, now ‘interior’, and a French door to the dining room, I get heat or air conditioning from the rest of the house. (Don’t worry, my HVAC system is sadly oversized, like most in the country – that’s another post.)

I have used that porch as my home office for several years now. But I’m starting to think about moving the office to another part of the house – and giving this room back to the elements.

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Big buildings save energy by controlling which areas need to have heating or cooling, and not wasting energy on those spaces when they are not occupied. Similar features are sometimes found on high end homes (and are probably almost a necessity on the oversized starter castles spread across the outskirts of every city). But systems like that are hard to retrofit into smaller, older homes.

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