Green Scene

BY PHIL HAGEN

The Enchantment Way in Las Vegas

Tate Snyder Kimsey Architects' home designs for The Enchantment Way.

Soon Vegas will be able to accommodate yet another kind of visitor: the eco-tourist. A few miles southwest of the neon Strip, a couple of real estate investors have planned a little something called The Enchantment Way for those who like sustainability as much as fancy Vegas vacations.

The five-acre parcel, which sits in the suburbs near Blue Diamond Road, may be little in terms of the development-seven luxury homes, to be used as vacation rentals, will be built-but big on green ideas. In fact, when completed later this year, it could be the first neighborhood in Nevada with single-family LEED-certified homes.

"This project will show a side of Vegas people don't see," says project designer Vince Novak, sitting in the conference room of Tate Snyder Kimsey Architects' headquarters, the first LEED-certified building in Las Vegas. In a land where sustainability has been slow to catch up with a long-hyperactive housing market—if not absent from the green game altogether—Enchantment's focus is zero-energy.

What's also noteworthy is who will see it: "The celebrities you saw in Vanity Fair's Green Issue," says TSKA associate Mike Purtill, AIA, talking about the May 2006 cover story on celebrity tree-huggers. In other words, Enchantment is targeting Hollywood.

"That's where we're spending our marketing money," says real estate investor Suzan Hudson, who will live in one of the homes with her business partner and husband, Frank Woodbeck. The two have a background in broadcasting and the entertainment industry.

Their endeavor began as "an interesting, friendly vacation home" idea that was all about profit. The eco-friendliness began when, during one of the couple's real-estate investment seminars, a participant turned the tables and offered them some advice—on why they needed to stop using Styrofoam cups.

Eventually they hired Steve Rypka of Green Dream Enterprises, a local "green living" consultant, to help with Enchantment. "I suggested they look at it from green-building standpoint, and the next thing I knew they had totally embraced it," he recalls.

To say the least. Hudson, an Albuquerque native, has evolved from Styrofoam landfiller who knew "nothing" about sustainability to green advocate who throws around terms such as "Native America Zen." She's "rescuing" rocks and plants from the site so that she can return them to their rightful places upon project completion. She's raising 18 baby tortoises that will eventually inhabit the neighborhood. She's planning an organic garden and, in the city famous for sending showgirls to grand openings, she's hired some local Paiutes to do a dance to bless the land.

"We're trying to have a whole mindset about honoring Mother Earth in this experience and inviting others to have a similar experience," she says.

As for the structures themselves, she followed Rypka's advice to sign up TSKA, where sustainability, Purtill says, "has become the focus and passion."

The guest homes (about 3,400 square feet each) are contemporary in style and cutting-edge in philosophy. Everything from renewable materials to the indoor-outdoor lifestyle was decided with sustainability in mind.

The walls will be made of straw bales for efficient, earth-friendly insulation, and the 2x6 studs will be 24 inches apart instead of the standard 16 to save 25 percent on lumber use. Windows will be commercial double-glazed (one inch thick, with a heat mirror in between), and exterior walls will include aged metal siding that will naturally vent the sun's heat up and out. Such features should keep each home's energy bill 40 percent lower than the standard Las Vegas home of the same size.

During the extreme months, other ideas will kick in, such as the indirect evaporative coolers, radiant floor heating and passive solar heating. To help achieve zero energy use, power will be generated by solar panels or photovoltaic cells.

Water-wise, TSKA hopes to cut use by 40 percent with the help of a variety of green products (low-flow toilets that use gray water) and a flat roof—following the owners' edict to not use the ubiquitous Spanish tiles—that is designed to collect every bit of southern Nevada's annual four inches of rainfall, which it sends via a gutter system down into a cistern for later irrigation use. The rest of the yard will be supplied from a second cistern, which collects the home's gray water (from the laundry and showers).

Other features contributing to TSKA's pursuit of certification (the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED for Homes, now a pilot program, is set to launch this summer) include use of low-VOC paints, permeable hardscape surfaces, 14-inch tubular skylights to brighten up normally dark areas such as closets, and mixing fly ash (a byproduct of thermal power generation) into cement, which saves on materials (it's a recycled product) and the energy used in production (it takes a barrel of oil to make a ton of cement).

While most of these ideas are not new to the architecture firm, "tying all the systems together" and "adopting commercial technologies to residential" are, Purtill says, "the biggest innovation for us in driving down the energy and water use for all systems."

Like any good eco-friendly product, The Enchantment Way will have a second use as well. Hudson and Woodbeck have added a new seminar to their real-estate program called "Embrace Green," and they'll use the homes as models to teach the community about sustainability.

That little step, Rypka says, is a big deal in—and emanating from—Las Vegas.

"The thing that gets me excited is, I see Vegas in general as a tremendous opportunity, and this fits right in. In a place that's over the top and known for excess, to have projects like Enchantment Way can change the image visitors have. And any indication that Vegas is going green could have an impact on a lot of people."