This new LEED Silver home shatters the myth that green houses lack comfort and luxury
by Matt Freeman
Photos by Matt Freeman, John Lewis, Rick Ziesing

The wooded five-acre setting on Sills Mill Road, east of Kennett Square, harks back to an earlier age, a time of fields of grain and water-powered grist mills. And although its design is contemporary, Avrim “Ave” and Vicki Topel’s new luxurious home is meant to evoke the charm of the region’s historic buildings.
The timeless natural world is also part of the design — the house is situated carefully on the site, embraced by a protective ring of tall trees. It rises amid a meadow of native plants and it looks out over fields where deer calmly graze.

But a closer look reveals that in many ways this home belongs less to the past than it does to a rapidly emerging and more sustainable future. In the process of building their home, the Topels and the team they assembled took advantage of what the region’s past and its natural world had to offer for its aesthetics, and ended up with a home that has earned prestigious awards for its cutting-edge energy efficiency technology and minimal disturbance of the environment.

Modest Plan

The Topels’ original goal was far more modest. With Ave in semi-retirement, they wanted a smaller home and a simpler life — less work on the yard, lower utility bills, and daily life lived mostly on one floor, ranch-house style. So they contacted Hugh Lofting of Hugh Lofting Timber Framing, who had built a carriage house for their former home. His colleague Amy Cornelius asked if they’d considered making the new home a “green” house.

What would that mean, the Topels asked — putting solar panels on the roof? Cornelius told them it was much more — a green house was far more comprehensive, a new type of construction for a new type of lifestyle. It involved achieving the highest energy efficiency and the lowest impact on the surrounding natural world. The Lofting organization had been proponents of this type of building for the previous 30 years. The Topels didn’t know much about the topic at the time of the conversation, but they were about to learn.

Contemporary Vernacular

The foundation for great green homes begins with smart, good design. Lofting intro-duced the Topels to architect Matthew Moger of Lyman Perry Architects. Moger asked for a “romantic description” of the house they dreamt of, met with them repeatedly, and spent time on the site, getting a sense of it. He says Lyman Perry’s belief is that you don’t simply create a building and apply it to the site; the structure should grow out the environment and fit it naturally.

Moger then created models and collages of indigenous architecture and native plants, assembling a range of elements drawn from historic buildings and the natural world. The goal was to create a simple design that would recall the barns and farmhouses of the region’s past, a style he calls “contemporary vernacular.”

And today, now that the two-year planning and building process is finished, visitors who come for guided tours travel up the long driveway and first see sloping, meadowed grounds covered with native plants and designed by Jonathan Alderson Landscape Architects of Wayne to control groundwater naturally.

Then visitors see what might be buildings of two different eras. One has large windows and heavy-beamed barn doors next to them, topped with a traditional standing seam metal roof. Beyond and perpendicular to this part of the house is a two-story building with red wooden siding and roof of the same standing seam metal construction, topped by a cupola.

The home is placed in the lee of a wall of poplar trees that stretches far above, protecting the home from the cold winter winds and providing cooling shade during warm weather months in an almost parental embrace. Moger says he feels a reverence for the site. Looking at this visual harmony of the building and surrounding trees, a visitor could be excused for imagining that the site feels fondly about the new home as well.

The glassed-in entranceway slate floor, designed with the home’s passive solar application to retain heat, and its timber framing and copper door (the Topels are fond of metal sculpture) is what Moger calls “your first ‘wow’ moment.” It connects the two buildings. Turning left, you enter the kitchen and living room area.

The roomy kitchen has soapstone counters and traditional wood cabinetry by David T. Smith of Morrow, Ohio. In the middle of the room is a massive stone fireplace by Landenberg stonemason Gary Odle that soars up to and through the timber-framed ceiling. Large windows give the living room on the other side beautiful views of the grounds. The reclaimed barn doors can be rolled over the windows for privacy.

Silver Rating, Green Beginnings

From the basement to the roof, the green technology was built in from the beginning by design and in compliance with the U.S.Green Building Council’s integrative approach to green construction. Many of these elements can be added to existing homes, but the concerted effort to use them so comprehensively won the Topel house the Silver rating from USGBC’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) designation program.There are only a handful of residences in all of Pennsylvania that have achieved the coveted LEED certification.

But there are more on the way. The Topels have become green-building advocates and recently wrote a book detailing their experience and the benefits green homes avail their occupants, the communities in which they are built in, and conserving our natural resources in Green Beginnings: The Story of How We Built Our Green & Sustainable Home. The couple also hosts educational orientation tours of their home—which they’ve begun calling the “Green Beginnings Home” since writing the book—to help others learn about green homes, and hosts a web site that shares experiential information about living in a green home as well.

Questions? Contact:
Avrim and Vicki Topel
Email: LEEDSilver@yahoo.com

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