PETER SABBETH, MODERN GREEN HOME
 Carissa Katz |
(2/21/2008) By the time Peter Sabbeth and his wife, Melissa Green, started Modern Green Home about a year and a half ago, they had already bought, renovated, and sold a couple of houses on the South Fork, so the building business was nothing new to them.
What was new was the idea of building those houses with entirely energy-efficient and environmentally friendly materials. They were designing a new spec house for a property they owned on North Haven with the Long Island City architectural firm sand_box, and as the architects “subtly suggested” things here and there to make the house more environmentally friendly, the couple became increasingly interested in the whole concept of “green” building.
“Once I get a bee in my bonnet about something, I go to the extreme,” Mr. Sabbeth said Tuesday in his Sag Harbor office. The house, which is under construction now, incorporates solar panels and a geothermal heating and cooling system. It has no stud walls or framing and no fiberglass insulation. Instead, its walls are structural insulated panels that are pre-built off site and insulated with “agricultural byproducts from farms in the Midwest,” Mr. Sabbeth explained.
Once the house was designed, it was all but impossible to find builders who understood how to work with the materials the couple wanted to use.
When they did find and train a group of people who could do what they needed, they formed their own construction company, Modern Green Home. Flavio Espinoza, an architect by training, is the project manager, and is “integral in transforming the drawings into green building principles,” Mr. Sabbeth said. Joshua Helfand runs the construction office. Mr. Sabbeth consults with the architects and researches products. Ms. Green, who has an interior design background, leads the way on the interiors and furnishings, as well as working with Mr. Sabbeth to “keep the place running.”
In addition to creating projects from the ground up, the company does combined green consulting and building, and Mr. Sabbeth can be hired as a consultant to work with a design team on how to incorporate green principles into a project.
Along with the house on North Haven, Modern Green Home is working on another spec house in Sagaponack. This one, in an 1860s farmhouse in the village’s historic district, includes a complete renovation of the historic house and “a very, very modern addition onto the back of it.” The architect is Seth Howe of Amagansett. The company is also set to begin a major renovation of a house in the Redwood section of Sag Harbor.
The house in Sagaponack should be quite the calling card for Modern Green Home. Formerly owned by the author James Jones of “From Here to Eternity” fame, it will be this year’s Hamptons Cottages and Gardens Idea House. “It’s going to be the first ecologically friendly designer showhouse in the Northeast,” Mr. Sabbeth said.
Mr. Sabbeth, who is a painter as well, knew the owner of the magazine, Richard Ekstract, through his art career. Mr. Ekstract heard about the project and contacted Mr. Sabbeth. “We just sat there and dreamed up this green designer showcase. It fell right into his agenda and our agenda.”
Any permanent design elements used in the showhouse will have to be eco-friendly, “and we’re encouraging their interior designers to be eco-friendly, as well,” Mr. Sabbeth said.
“I thought a statement needed to be made to people building these mansions,” he said. People with money will always build big houses, but “they should do it responsibly. Just because you’re going to build a 10,000-square-foot house doesn’t mean you need to have a 10,000-square-foot footprint on the earth.”
The Sagaponack house, which will be 6,300 square feet with a 2,700-square-foot finished basement, will use half as much energy as other houses its size and will utilize solar panels and geothermal heating and cooling systems. All the lumber used in its construction will be certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council, meaning it will come from operations that replant as many trees as they cut down.
Like the other projects Modern Green Home is working on, it will have a lighting control system, which will turn off lights when no one is in a room. “That can reduce electrical consumption by something like 15 percent,” Mr. Sabbeth said.
“The only fossil fuel used in the house will be the gas for cooking.”
The house will help highlight a principle Modern Green Homes has been pushing since it started — that people interested in energy efficiency and environmentally responsible building need not sacrifice quality and luxury.
“When you get to high-end products, if you’re going to spend $5 million, $10 million, $20 million on a house, you’re paying top dollar anyway. Green products are not going to cost any more.” And, as he sees it, for the man who just has to have a huge house, making it green “is kind of his responsibility.”
All the houses that Modern Green Home is working on are being built to the highest Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards. The LEED program, run by the United States Green Building Council, rates houses based on sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials, and indoor environmental quality. Mr. Sabbeth and Ms. Green are hoping for the highest rating, platinum, for the North Haven house, which will be under 3,000 square feet. Because of its size, the best rating the Sagaponack house can achieve is the next highest, gold.
With so many people jumping on the green bandwagon, “it’s good to have this system in place because it defines how far homes have to go to get a rating,” Mr. Sabbeth said. And in selling their houses as “green homes,” it helps if the projects “speak a language that people know about.”
It’s true, Mr. Sabbeth said, that many things designed to save energy are quite expensive to install, making the luxury market a natural for such projects. But he is convinced that small measures can be taken on almost any budget. Things like reusing rainwater or dishwater are simple and “shouldn’t cost any more,” he said. “It’s a matter of knowing what’s available and asking your builder or contractor.”
The more popular and prevalent energy-efficient and environmentally conscious products and projects become, the more affordable they will be, he said. “If everybody south of the highway put solar panels on their roofs, that would make it cheaper for everybody north of the highway to do it.”
Traditional builders tend to be resistant, but Mr. Sabbeth thinks that will change. “While now it’s probably a bit trendy to do things that are green, it’s going to become the vernacular,” he said.