LEADVILLE — The place would be a second home.
Thus, “Who am I kidding?” said Josh Blum. “That’s not environmental.”
But if the concept of a second home could never please the green police, at least the house itself might.
So Blum, wife Meg Lemon, and a business partner in the house, Jon Manheim — all Denver physicians and all committed to environmental mindfulness — began reading about sustainable housing and researching builders.
The final product, a 2,500square-foot model of energy efficiency, is one of 25 featured in a new book, “Prefabulous and Sustainable,” that explores methods of building that reduce the footprint new houses leave on the Earth, from the materials used in construction to the energy the houses draw to stay warm.
Another house, in Denver’s Highland neighborhood, is also featured in the book. The 2,700- square-foot home is 18 feet wide and built in part from prefabricated modules.
Blum had nearly 3 acres to work with on the outskirts of Leadville, so space wasn’t an issue.
A homegrown structure
The biggest decision for the Blum group? The bones. Would the house be framed in two-byfours? Built out of logs? Adobe?
They went with straw-bale construction: walls made from 18-inch-thick Alamosa straw bales that are stacked like Legos and held together with Colorado lodgepole-pine timber. The timber frame was assembled in Breckenridge by the builder and trucked to the land.
The hay was covered with something like chicken wire, and the builders then smothered the straw-and-wire walls in a plaster made from Colorado clay, sand, pigment and even manure (it helps bind things). The construction method is a green twofer: It uses existing, local, natural materials (straw, local clay, trees that had been previously downed), and the thick walls are superb insulators, helping reduce energy use.
Many mountain homes are paeans to consumption: countertops from Brazilian hardwood, bathtubs the size of wading pools, eight-burner stoves with three ovens.
But Blum wanted something humble and simple. This house, completed in late 2004, was for relaxing, for unwinding after long weeks in Denver, for the kids.
Furniture? Old couches. Roof? Corrugated steel. Appliances? Modest stuff from Bud’s Warehouse, a discount builders-supply place in Denver. Stair railings? Lengths of copper tubing on one, rebar on another. They went with shelves instead of cabinets in the kitchen, and used piñon branches as shelf brackets.
The three downstairs bedrooms are barely big enough to hold a bed. The bathtub is old-school — more for standing up and showering than lying down for a long soak.
A meandering chimney
The highlight of the house, for Blum, is the masonry fireplace, a massive, stone presence in the center of the downstairs living space.
The fireplace’s chimney does not shoot straight up and out of the house, directing the precious heat into the great outdoors. Instead, the chimney winds through the fireplace stones before exiting. The design removes much of the environmentally problematic particulate matter that comes from burning logs. In addition, it forces the flames to heat the fireplace, which then radiates warmth into the house for hours.
Even without the fire, the house stays warm.
Blum recently visited the house after being gone for more than a week. When he arrived shortly before noon, the temperature outside was in the 20s and it had sunk close to zero during the night. Leadville, after all, is nearly 2 miles high.
The heat in the house was not turned on, but the temperature inside was 61 degrees.
“We wanted to put more into energy efficiency,” said Blum, who treats AIDS/HIV patients. “Our windows cost more than we anticipated.”
Walking on a heat sink
It’s not just the thick walls and the fireplace, though, that retain heat. The floors are concrete, what Blum called a “heat sink.” They warm up eventually, and stay warm. (The house has a radiant heat system in the floor, but it’s seldom used.) The house’s design maximizes gains from passive solar, as well — meaning it harvests whatever heat the sun is tossing its way. It faces south, and that side of the structure holds most of the windows. On the cold north side of the house, the roof angles down close to the ground.
The house fulfills the battery of requirements Blum had stipulated before the couple had even decided to own a second home: It must be within two hours of Denver; a family ski resort should be nearby (Ski Cooper is in Leadville); the house must be near a real town, instead of a resort. The price? Relatively cheap.
And the kicker: Whatever they would build must leave as subtle an environmental footprint as possible.
“We live for this,” said Blum from the second-floor deck, gazing at snow-capped mountains on the horizon in every direction.
“Within minutes of getting up here, our shoulders relax, and we unwind.”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
