Eco-Challenge: Living Green in Springs
By Joanne Pilgrim
 Edvin Karl Stromsten, Architect
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(07/26/2007) Last summer, East Hampton was introduced to the “branded house”: a house rented by a nightclub or fashion company, for example, for V.I.P. guests to frolic in. Sponsors eager to expose visitors to their brand stocked the liquor cabinet and the kitchen, provided creams and oils for spa treatments, and distributed freebies emblazoned with their logo.
This year, product placement has gone green.
Corrin Arasa, founder of Events East, a Southampton public relations firm, rented an energy-efficient and ecologically sound house on Copeces Lane in Springs as a showcase for Project GreenHouse Hamptons.
The house was designed and built by Edvin Karl Stromsten, an architect, as an experiment in sustainable-living systems, such as solar electricity generation and geothermal heating and cooling, Mr. Stromsten said.
On weekends, there have been parties with bold-name hosts to educate the public about ecological principles and to raise money for environmental groups such as the Rainforest Foundation, Charity Water (which builds wells in Africa), Powershift (which educates college students about how they can help the environment), and World Feed (which is supported by Lauren Bush, the president’s niece). An event this weekend will raise money for Riverkeeper.
And of course, there have been sponsors: Yahoo! Green, the search engine’s environmental education forum; 360 Vodka, an organic spirit in recycled glass bottles, and Silverjet, a new “business class luxury” airline that flies between Newark and London and calls itself the world’s first “carbon neutral” airline. (Included in the price of a Silverjet ticket is a sum that will be donated to “climate friendly” projects around the world, as a means of offsetting the environmental damage caused by jet travel, a factor in global warming.)
Lexus, which makes several “luxury hybrid” vehicles with “super-ultra-low emissions,” was also a sponsor, as was KaBoom, an organic energy drink, and the cable channel HGTV, which broadcasts “Living With Ed,” a reality show chronicling attempts by the actor Ed Begley and his wife to live an eco-friendly lifestyle in Hollywood.
Project GreenHouse Hamptons was conceived by Ms. Arasa as a way to promote a message she cares about. “I’ve always been camping, and really loved nature, but felt such a disconnect from it after moving to New York,” she said yesterday. Four years ago, when she was pregnant, she said, she had focused on “what was going into my body,” and began to learn more about foods, toxins, and strains on the environment.
“Having a platform, since I’m a marketer and a public relations person . . . I wanted to showcase green living — fashion, and food, and decor. What we realized, as marketers, is that the easiest change to accept, is to help people to understand what choices they can make as consumers.”
Ms. Arasa set up a suite in Park City, Utah, during the Sundance Film Festival in January, decorating it with “eco-furniture” and natural fabrics and appointing it with green luxury products. Noting that visitors to both Sundance and the East End are “avid consumers,” and with her own East End roots, Ms. Arasa decided to replicate and expand the demonstration here.
Josh May, a Sag Harbor blogger and Web editor, agreed to spend most of July in Mr. Stromsten’s house, adhering to “green living” principles: eating only food produced within 25 miles of the house, wearing natural fabrics, eliminating the use of plastics, and getting about on a a bicycle or motorized scooter (there’s a Lexus hybrid in the driveway, but only for use during inclement weather or an emergency). He even had to quit smoking.
Mr. May will be penalized for any slipups. Punishments, such as planting a tree, will be assigned to offset his environmentally damaging actions.
Installing Mr. May in the house was a way to expand the message, Ms. Arasa said. Exposing partygoers and visitors to sustainable-living concepts was one thing. “People come in, they get it, and they love it, but it’s a limited experience. But then we said, ‘What’s it like for someone to live like this completely and wholly?’ ”
Mr. May, a friend she described as not yet up to speed with ecologically conscious living — not just a smoker, he eats meat and drives an S.U.V. — was “a good victim and a good sport, and a good writer.”
“Let’s dare him to do it,” she recalled thinking.
He moved in at the beginning of July and has been posting blog entries on the Yahoo! Green site. He will move out on Monday, and is thinking about the cheeseburger he plans to eat.
“It was pretty tough,” he said yesterday. “When I was going into it, I thought not smoking was going to be the biggest problem. But it was not as big a problem as getting around anywhere in the Hamptons without a car.”
“Eating was tough, too,” he said. “I was hungry for a lot of the month.” Obtaining local foods required some planning, and there was no junk food, except for potato chips made by the Foster family on their farm in Sagaponack.
“It’s been an amazing month,” Ms. Arasa said. “We didn’t anticipate how difficult it would be for him. He had a hard time in the beginning. He switched his whole lifestyle overnight.”
“There was plenty of screwing up,” Mr. May said earlier this week. “I’d find myself brushing my teeth and leaving the water running,” or leaving a room without turning the lights off. “There were “a million little things like that.”
Mr. May did have some help, however. Simon Sheridan, a chef who runs the catering business Exquisite Foods, oversaw his meals, and guest appearances were made by other chefs, including Katie Lee Joel, Billy Joel’s wife and the former host of Bravo’s “Top Chef.” Brian Halweil of Sag Harbor, editor of the magazine Edible East End, was another adviser.
Mr. Stromsten lives with his family in a house on Copeces Lane next door to the green one, and in New York City, where he has practiced architecture and taught at City College, Cooper Union, the New York Institute of Technology, and the New School. He said his goal had been to create “as close as we could get to an energy-free house.”
“ I’d say it was about 90 percent successful,” he said on Tuesday. The design follows some “basic principles,” he said. “Some of them date back to the caveman,” such as orienting the building toward the south, to take advantage of the sun’s warmth, and making it function as a “passive solar machine,” with a wall of windows and photovoltaic panels. The north and east sides of the house are “earth-sheltered,” Mr. Stromsten said, “which gives you a lot less to fight against, so to speak.”
Concrete walls and floors create thermal mass, holding heat in the winter and slowly sloughing it off in summer. The geothermal heating system uses no fossil fuels, only electricity to run well pumps and motors. That electricity is generated by the solar cells on the roof, which, since the house was completed last fall, have provided enough to power the house, keeping it at an even 70 degrees night and day, and even to generate extra power, which is pumped back into the Long Island Power Authority grid, providing Mr. Stromsten with a LIPA rebate.
The architect used “fairly normal building materials,” such as wood framing and drywall, but added a lot of insulation. All the appliances and motors in the house have an Energy Star rating for efficiency.
“We tried to do everything relatively inexpensively,” Mr. Stromsten said. The three-bedroom, two-bathroom house cost “under $500,000” to build, excluding the land, which he already owned.
“For almost 40 years I’ve been trying to do energy-efficient buildings of all kinds, institutions, larger buildings, houses. . . . It’s always in my mind, ever since I got out of school,” the architect said. “I figured I would sell it after I built it. But mainly, I built it to prove that I could do it, and also to learn from the experience I had when I was building it.”
“We’re hoping that it will be one step in moving people in that direction. If everyone in this country did this, we wouldn’t have an energy crisis.” Mr. Stromsten is now creating designs for others who want ecologically sound residences.
For Mr. May, some changes will be lasting. Though it was difficult, he said, he enjoyed doing more biking, and will continue. He won’t start smoking again, however. “And I’m going to stick with being local as much as I can. Local food out here is amazing.”