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The House That ebay Built

From The Boston Globe Sunday magazine
His Way on eBay
Faced with a tight budget, a determined homeowner went bargain hunting online to outfit his family's sleek new place.
By Rachel Levitt | June 10, 2007

You have to have a sense of humor if you’re building modern in New England. When Steve Ratner’s house in Southborough was almost finished, a woman walking her dog asked the proud owner, “When is the roof going up?” Even the building inspector admonished, “You know you have the only house like this in Southborough. Are you from California or something?”

Ratner is used to questions like these and suspects that some folks may still be waiting for the gable roof to be delivered on a flatbed truck, but he loves his house. Ratner, who is president of the multimedia firm Ivy Creative, and his wife, Amy, dreamed of this: a home suitable for Dwell magazine – something open, sunny, flat-roofed, and modern, where they could live a low-maintenance lifestyle with their two young sons. In William Ruhl of Ruhl Walker Architects in Boston, they found a perfect match for budget modern. “We gave Will lots of clippings to show him what we wanted,” says Amy. “At our initial meeting, he presented his idea, and I kept thinking, I shouldn’t like the first thing I see, but I do. Finally Will said, ‘It’s OK to like it.’ ”

“The budget was $150 a square foot,” says Ruhl, “which for custom houses around here is very tight, about half the average cost. We did some quick sketches of a small house – 2,500 square feet. This was tiny by today’s suburban standards.”

How do you design a small house that feels big? “Eliminate circulation wherever you can,” the architect says. “Everything is usable space. So, instead of separate living and dining rooms, we went with one big space. The double-height area in the plan is actually quite small, but when you connect it to the second floor with windows and balconies, you appreciate the volume. The see-through fireplace makes it feel like they have two fireplaces for the price of one.”

The flat roof, which uses less material than a conventional peaked roof and requires no gutters, also satisfied both design and budget goals.

Controlling the architectural price was only half of the story – all the fixtures and finishes in the house would add up, too. So Steve Ratner did what few of us would dare: He ordered everything – from sinks to lights to faucets to toilets, everything – via the Internet, most of it from eBay. It took him a year to research and obtain all the parts he needed, using the garage at his old house in nearby Framingham as a warehouse. “Kids’ parents would come over and marvel at the boxes,” says Amy. “I’d say, ‘Oh, that’s a toilet,’ or ‘That’s an exhaust fan.’ ”

Steve determined exactly what he wanted and then waited for the right price. The Iris recessed lighting fixtures in the living room, for example, retail for $200 to $300 apiece, depending on the trim, but he bought 18 for $125, total, on eBay. Other lighting fixtures that sell in stores for $68 each, he bought for $25 – for two. Most communication with the sellers was via e-mail, and in the hundreds of transactions, he says, he never got burned.

This kind of shopping isn’t for everyone. It takes a tremendous amount of patience – and flexibility, since sometimes “perfect” is less than so. The KWC kitchen faucet, which retails for $650 and Ratner found for $75, came with some minor scratches, but that was enough to persuade the seller to knock off an additional $25.

And while the bargain hunting was labor-intensive for Steve, it actually made the process easier for the architect and builder. “We were happy, because we didn’t have to source all of this stuff,” says Ruhl. “Steve could get much nicer things than what you’d typically get for the budget allowances. He got beautiful things at Home Depot prices.”

Even after the Ratners could no longer afford his services, Ruhl followed the project, showing up now and again to see how the construction was coming along. “I simply loved the project and enjoyed watching it go up,” he says.

Now, sometimes for fun, the Ratners and their boys build a model of the house out of Legos. The flat roof and boxy form are perfect for the modular medium, and best of all, they don’t need to order any special Lego pieces from eBay.

Rachel Levitt is editor of Boston Home magazine. E-mail her at rlevitt@bostonmagazine.com.

Pushing the Eco Envelope

copyright 2007 Design New England magazine, Boston Globe Media
Hed: Pushing the Eco Envelope
Dek: An expansive new Boston-area house blends 20th century Bauhaus style with 21st-century geothermal technology

Welcome to Bauhaus cool, a contemporary interpretation of the early-20th-century design movement committed to unifying art, craft, and technology. Bauhaus influences are everywhere here: in the kitchen shelves hung from steel cables, in the stair risers made of metal fins, in various doors and windows swinging or sliding on beautifully machined hardware. These details combine the crispness of mass-produced pieces with the patinas of handworked woods and finishes to create a 21st-century take on the most influential modernist movement.

One of the homeowners had grown up in a Bauhaus home and loved its aesthetic. She and her husband hired architect Maryann Thompson of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to capture the modern spirit for their new house just outside of Boston. Thompson, deeply respectful of the movement, also recognized how the style could forward her interest in sustainable design. “Every project I do is passive solar,” she says. “This is a full-time house, open to the south, so I organized the public rooms to invite in natural light and heat. The north side is what I call the insulating wall—that’s where I put the coat closets, the bathroom, a real band of storage.”

The main rooms of the 4,500-square-foot house—kitchen, dining, and living areas—are conveniently arranged on one floor. Slightly sequestered to one side, an east-facing office suite accessible via a glazed bridge maintains a sense of quiet and privacy; a two-story bedroom wing mirrors it to the west. Running like a spine along the main space is a 64-foot-long, 6-foot-wide slate-floored corridor that steps gently down to the east. In the mornings and evenings, this space is filled with sunlight. The rest of the day, the sun plays with the solids and transparencies of the main spaces, casting intricate shadows across the wood floors. “In this house, there are moments of epiphany, a wonder at the world. You turn the corner and discover something unexpected,” says Thompson, whose enlightened floor plan was brought to fruition by builder Doug Hanna, of S+H Construction, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The decision to invest in a geothermal system for heating and cooling was a key factor in the project, and one that stemmed from the owners’ desire “to tread more lightly,” says Thompson. In winter months, heat from the earth is delivered to each room of the house. To keep the house cool in summer, she created a complex system of cross-ventilation. Every room has operable windows on opposing walls to encourage natural airflow. The architectural design encourages the stack effect: Because hot air rises, cupolas, high windows, and operable clerestory windows create a vacuum that pulls air through the spaces. Says Thompson, “On a hot day, you can really feel the air moving, reducing the need for air-conditioning, which is environmentally expensive.” There are also low windows just off the floor, a mere 12 inches high, that the client calls “dog windows” because, when she was little, her parents’ dogs watched the world through similar apertures.

One of the most dynamic aspects of the design is how spaces slip into each other. A wide slate-clad chimney separates the eating and kitchen area from the living room, but the hearth can open to both spaces. A cantilevered shelf wraps around a wall from the long corridor into the 30 by 20–foot living room. Interior clerestory windows abound, bringing light from the main living spaces into deeper rooms. Even the framing reaches beyond the exterior walls, defining the gardens and pathways that meld the house into the landscape.

Builder Doug Hanna appreciated the challenges of building a modernist house from the ground up, after extensive experience renovating modern homes. “There are interesting quirks to modern construction, like cedar siding that runs vertically instead of horizontally,” he says. “But the real challenge is making sure every bit of plaster is dead on—there are no moldings and baseboards here. And with materials like steel, which the staircase is made of, there’s a precision required that is quite different than working with wood.”

The interior design reflects a modern sensibility. “Mid-century modern is both a style and a way of living,” explains interior designer Jeffrey Katz, “The owners didn’t want the house to look decorated; they wanted it to look like an accumulation of things. So we incorporated small art pieces into the built-in bookcases and niches—a casual way to display objects. The house is warm and homey, lived-in.”

“This is not a family house, though,” the owner observed. “We raised our children in a much smaller house—we were always on top of each other, and I think that’s the way it should be. In this house, because of the corridor, we can live very separately, which works well now,” adds the owner, whose two sons are in their 20s, and live at home for brief spells.
Although very private, the owners enjoy entertaining. They wanted a fully functional kitchen but didn’t want it to be a grand showpiece. To keep the kitchen striking yet unobtrusive, Thompson designed it around a large interior pantry, easily overlooked by the casual observer. The kitchen’s public face features stove, grill, stainless steel refrigerator, and dual sinks, modestly screened from the open dining area by a wood-sheathed island. But the nuts and bolts are hidden from view, just as the bedroom suite is secluded from the main spaces.

Deliberately concealing the personal spaces lends the house an early-20th-century formality: What is public is clear and open, what is private is small and quiet. It is a formality many contemporary homes lack. Although the Bauhaus movement originated a century ago, it still holds many lessons for us, not least of which is how to celebrate the machine age and still leave room for mystery.


Sidebar:
Heating and cooling a house geo¬thermally is a relatively new concept, but amazingly efficient, especially here in New England. Geothermal systems work differently from ordinary furnace/air-conditioning systems. Furnaces must create their own heat by burning a fuel, typically natural gas, propane, or oil. For this house located outside of Boston, there’s no need to create heat, hence no need to burn anything. Instead, the earth’s natural heat is collected in winter through a loop, a series of pipes that goes 300 feet down into the ground. Fluid circulating in the loop carries this heat to the home. An indoor system then uses electrically driven compressors and heat exchangers in a vapor compression cycle—the same system refrigerators use—to concentrate the heat and release it at a higher temperature into the house.

Geothermal heating works exceptionally well for in-floor radiant heat systems, and in this case it has saved approximately 60 percent of projected energy costs. The house does have a gas-fired backup heating system, but it has been used only once since the family moved in. In summer, the process is reversed in order to cool the home: Excess heat is drawn from the house, expelled to the loop, and absorbed by the ground below.

While relatively expensive to install, the geothermal system has almost paid for itself in just three years. It is reliable, consumes only enough electricity to drive the pumps, and does not require the burning of fossil fuels.