“Gardens don’t have enough play” ~ Alexander Reford
A cultural touchstone along the St. Lawrence River, Les Jardins de Métis (also known as Reford Gardens) is a center for ecological experimentation, landscape-design innovation and playful pursuits in an idyllic setting resplendent with flowers.
In these English-style gardens, the prototype eco-house ERE 132 offers wall-to-wall lessons in how to build and live in a home that brings together the latest in green technology without sacrificing comfort or seeing costs go through the roof.
Overlooking the broad St. Lawrence River, the gardens are also home to an annual, summer-long festival bringing together some 25 installations designed by teams of landscape architects and artists from around the world: Spain, Vancouver, New York, Québec and more.
Alexander Reford is director of the gardens, a biographer, historian and great-grandson of the property’s creator, Elsie Reford. Here he discusses the festival and ERE 132.
The Festival
Alexander Reford: The invitation we made to the designers was, submit to us a project that would be fun, engaging, interactive and essentially get people away from their screens in their basements and into the outdoors. And so they’re interactive. You can jump. You can climb. You can leap. You can almost swim, because we get your feet wet.
And this is an invitation to families and kids to just get outdoors and have fun. And it’s been successful. I think they’re colorful. They’re vibrant. They’re kind of playing a little bit with one’s imagination but they’re also, I think, making a political statement, which is, you know, there’s a time for screens but there’s a time for play and play is collective. It’s together, it’s engaging and it’s fun. It’s laughter _ and gardens don’t have enough play and this garden festival has maybe too much! So it’s a great invitation for people to really enjoy the virtues and creativity and to see how landscape architects from today are rethinking outdoor play and outdoor spaces.”
ERE 132 Eco Home, opened June 2015
“It’s in the vocabulary of affordability. So it’s not a giant, technical super science house full of computers that only four people in the world can understand.” ~ Alexander Reford
Cal: By now, do you have a sense of how this house has advanced the science of ecological living? What have you been able to prove? What are the growing pains?
Alexander Reford: Yeah it’s a good question. I think we’ve shown that green building is, A. possible; B. affordable; C. doesn’t have to be the playground of the rich and the influential. This is a modest footprint. It’s meant to be an affordable building. It is on the high end of affordability, let’s be clear. But what we’ve seen and think over just the use of the building is how energy-efficient it is. So we’ve endured three winters with high variations in those winters. Last winter was particularly tough. And yet the consumption is low to unusually low and the comfort levels are high to unusually high. So I think we’ve shown that you can be affordable, ecological and sensitive to the user needs all four seasons.
Cal: Tell me about the origins of this. Why is it here?
Alexander Reford: We had two objectives. One was, frankly, our own, which was to try and provide ourselves with the residence where we could house artists and visiting experts in the off season.
So we have a need to _ we have what’s called a Landscape Laboratory and we would put people up in nearby hotels and chalets and the complexities of organizing and orchestrating that suggested that if we had an onsite capacity, we could allow them to work in various times of the year and make our site more vibrant by having these interesting people being here physically onsite.
The second was to link with the architecture community nearby and to provide, I guess, a significant gesture, which is to _ you know, we talk a lot about being green and gardens are green, but you know we’re just as bad consumers as anyone else. We produce giant volumes of garbage and waste. We use various products that we use very occasionally but a garden requires maintenance and a garden is a very unnatural natural environment. So the ecological house was a kind of a way for us to show our mettle, I guess, and to do it in a very obvious way. And so we linked with engineers, architects, local building experts and 85-plus suppliers of materials. And the idea there was frankly to connect to that community of builders and the manufacturers who export their materials but often don’t have much of a presence locally.
So we know we have wood being milled locally but if we’re a resident here we don’t see it very often on the floors of hardware stores. We don’t see it in the building supply venues. So the idea was to provide those people with a venue to promote their products to our visitors who are from the region but to the many thousands who come from other parts of Québec and Canada.
Cal: When I first visited three years ago, one thing that stuck in my head was tapping the heat of the refrigerator into the venting system. What are some other examples like that _ where people come away and say, why didn’t people think of that before?
Alexander Reford: I think one of the things people come away with a little bit is, you know, ‘Oh I’ve got a basement and I hate it. You know I spent all this money in my basement and it’s full of whatever, A. stuff, and B. mushrooms, and C. occasionally water. We’ve had a lot of issues in Québec in the last two years over occasional flooding and that’s highly expensive and generally disruptive.
The fact that you can live in a house with lots of public spaces so you have tiny bedrooms, frankly modest if not overly modest bedrooms, and big generous public spaces: I think that gives a cue to people to maybe rethink their own composition of their house.
The third element, I think, is that because we have a bedroom and a full bathroom on the ground level, it also brings to people’s consciousness the fact that as we age our ability to adapt (lessens). Aging people having to leave their own homes. One of the great ironies of North American building construction is that we build homes for ourselves or we buy homes for ourselves, we modify them, we spend giant sums of money on it and then when we most need our house we end up going to some awful institution where we have to leave the house that we built.
So here they’ve designed it so that there’s a full bedroom and bathroom on the ground level and it’s just cuing people to rethink as they’re building their own houses. And that’s an unusual luxury. Not many of us have the luxury to do that. But all the same, to think of the house design as an evolutionary structure that evolves with their own lifestyle.
Cal: You can grow old here.
Alexander Reford: You can grow old in your own house. What a great luxury. And it’s not one, oddly enough, that many people give themselves. So the idea was to give that cue to people to think a little bit more carefully when they’re renovating and building.
Part 2 ~
Cal: So is this the everything-old-is-new-again theme?
Alexander Reford: I think there’s a combination of elements. I think there is a question of rediscovering what old and best practices work. I think what we learned a little bit in this process is that designers today know everything and they have access to wide amounts of information. I think the weak link in construction, frankly, is the general contractor.
And they have a very set and standard way to do everything. And what we’ve learned in this particular building was, really, you had to reteach the contractor and their staff just how to seal a window, for instance. You know it’s all done very quickly and their job is to get in and out of a contract very, very quickly and efficiently because that’s how they can make their money. And that’s not illegitimate. It’s just that you know the windows now are so high performance. And so if there is leakage it tends to be around the window, not the window itself. I think that’s true everywhere. It’s getting precision and getting exactitude. It’s an old technique but if you have a good site manager obviously then you can ensure that the performance levels meet your expectations.
Cal: It’s only been 4 years…
Alexander Reford: It’s our 4th summer. We opened it in June 2015 so we’ve gone through 3 winters and we’re in our 4th summer now.
Cal: Are you connected to a network, for example in Baie-St-Paul, the eco house? Their Habitat 07?
Alexander Reford: Yes. Yeah we’ve done a lot of work with Écohabitation and it’s become a bit of an example. It’s not the only one. There’s some other great buildings. I think this is a bit different because it’s not self-built.
It’s not made of straw and super ecological materials. It’s in the vocabulary of affordability. So it’s not a giant, technical super science house full of computers that only four people in the world can understand.
It really is meant to be accessible. And it is. So I think we’re in a world of comparatives. Comparative buildings. There’s a great one in Wakefield in Québec as well and there a number of others that have been built and we’re not the only one. It is not a passive house. It is a house which has got (platinum?) and various other certifications. So it is kind of in a school of learning. But the great thing about this building is it’s seen by like 20–25,000 people every summer. So it really is seen by a lot of people, high volume, and we have very good guides who can provide some essential basic information and then refer people to other websites and linkages to learn more.
Cal: Is there something about Québec _ about the resourcefulness of Québec, the brutal winters of Québec _ that makes this a kind of laboratory for energy efficiency?
Alexander Reford: Québec, I think, has a long tradition of experimenting with building and I think this is an example of it. I think Québec is living in a lap of luxury because we have a lot of hydroelectricity. So we overconsume electricity because it’s very inexpensive. But I think that the building trades realize that that shift will happen, at some point we’ll pay the same rates that other people in North America pay. So I think building efficiency is important.
And I think, frankly, those of us who live in this cold climate would like a little bit of comfort. I live in a house _ it’s not that old and yet it’s highly uncomfortable because the doors are poorly closing and the windows are pretty seamed. I don’t have radiant heat flooring, but what a difference that makes if you can heat yourself from the bottom up.
So I think we’re all wishing we lived in a comfortable house like this. And so I think the idea is to obviously teach people about renovations but also new buildings can hopefully change the needle a little bit so that when new construction happens, when it’s a single family dwelling, we do so properly.
Cal: Just finally then on cost. What do you think someone could build a house for that embraces most of these concepts?
Alexander Reford: The sort of full-in cost, excluding land, for this building if you were to build it today, it would be in the $400,000 Canadian ($300,000 USD) range. It’s got high-end materials, so it’s got nice finishes and granites and solid wood and the cabinetry _ so you could certainly do the same thing for much less if you wanted to. If you did some of the work yourself, obviously you’d save.
This is a public building. So we’ve had to compromise with things like emergency exits. And wallboard and you know exterior staircase _ things that you wouldn’t have to do if you’re building this as a single family dwelling.
So we’ve gone over the top a little bit just because we have no choice. So I think you can come in at a lower level for a similar kind of house. And that was the idea _ to be in the $250,000 to $400,000 range. We’re certainly at the top of that range. But I think that the template and the footprint and the size of the building, you could do something similar for 250 to 275.
Cal: And what is the monetary value of the efficiency you gain? How does that fit in?
Alexander Reford: Well certainly we’re saving upwards of _ in Québec electricity terms we’re saving $600 to $800 a month in the winter months. So a significant saving in the November to March range.
Some ranges, the economies are modest because we’re not, we don’t have air conditioning , so we’re not using much and we don’t use much air conditioning in this part of the world. But an average economy would be $2,400 to $3,000, something like that, compared to a similar house in a similar situation somewhere else. Certainly I know my house is highly energy efficient and it’s very expensive in January-February-March.
And then of course the finishes are such and the various other elements mean that the maintenance is lower, that the quality of construction was high. We’ve had virtually no retouching, refinishing. The paint chips _ the ecological paint I would not recommend a second time. But that’s one of the only elements of the building that I think that we would have changed. Some materials just are not suitable for a commercial usage. But aside from that we’ve been 99.9 percent pleased.
Cal: No ecological paint or is that a specific kind?
Alexander Reford: It’s a special kind. Well it’s a mix. It’s a recycled paint and you can certainly see that recycled paints have adhesion problems. And I don’t know if it was poorly applied or is a bad product.
