Features > Home, Sweet, Off-the-Grid Home
By Denise Hart
Interior Photography By John Hession
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Bruce Adami and Bob Cote had a ten-year plan for building the house of their dreams—one that would make use of native materials, incorporate passive-solar elements of design (such as the house’s orientation to the sun and its extra insulation), sit gracefully on the land, have a woodshop for Cote to create furniture projects and annual holiday ornaments, and room for Adami’s grand piano in the living room. Most of all, the house had to be a beautiful place with custom features and all the modern conveniences. And, the pair wanted to have a major role in the construction of it.
“It’s interesting that we weren’t more anxious to get it done,” says Cote, relaxing in sofa near the Russian masonry woodstove. He’s right—not many owner-builders envision such a patient timeline that allows for getting to know a site and working out the construction details. And, amazingly, the project went only about seven months beyond the ten-year goal.
Choosing the Site
In June 1994, Cote and Adami purchased twenty-four acres of land in Deerfi eld. At the time, they were living in Auburn, where “we did a kitchen remodel, bath tiling, installed windows there—it gave us a chance to improve our construction skills,” notes Cote, an environmental engineer whose father was a contractor.
Cote and Adami had been inspired by homes they had visited for several years on the annual green buildings tour, sponsored by the New Hampshire Sustainable Energy Association, and were thinking of using some of these concepts themselves. Today they live in a post-and-beam-framed, passive-solar house with 2,800 square feet of living space that’s independent of the public-utility electrical grid as a result of a sustainable design and innovative energy systems.
The driveway to the house snakes through the woods for about one-third of a mile, a factor that eventually led Cote and Adami to install photovoltaic panels for electricity rather than pay the costs of running a line from the main road. The house rises from the hilltop, and two solar panels greet visitors at the top of the driveway.
For the first five years of their ten-year process, Cote and Adami focused their efforts on clearing the house site, patiently cutting trees, milling and air-drying planks for a year or more as the two worked the land. Paul Smith, a Deerfield excavator, helped with site work and installing the driveway. Pete Mahoney, of Mahoney Timber Framing in Deerfield, helped with milling the timber and framing the house.
“We had an idea of what type of house we wanted for the site,” says Adami, a church musician. “We spent five to six years preparing the road and the site, and didn’t really talk to anyone. Then we met [residential architectural designer] Michael Greene, and he encouraged us to nestle the house into the hill and not place it at the very top.”
“The house incorporates basic energy-efficient design: a south-facing slope, building the house into the hill for earth buffering on the north,” says Cote, who takes great pleasure in mapping out the details. “We had done sketches, floor plans and even built models from Styrofoam board. Michael Greene brought new ideas into our thinking, both as a designer and as a contractor. For example, by raising the outside walls four feet, it gave us enough room for a second-floor living space that was much more practical than our original ranch-style design.”
The Design Process
“It was a very elaborate process,” says Greene, who is based in Deerfi eld. His interest in sculpture led him into designing and building homes in the 1970s, with an emphasis on solar architecture. He’s a follower of Frank Lloyd Wright’s principles of organic architecture, which emphasizes paying attention to the geography of the site, seeking to create a house that mirrors the landscape, and reducing barriers between the inside and outside through design and material choices.
“I began to see a set of principles that would work in this climate where we need heat,” Greene adds. “I’m a big believer that you not only have to get heat but you have to store that heat.”
Cote and Adami added landscape architect Joe Hochrein of Blackwater Design in Webster to their design team early in the process. “They wanted to go with more sustainable design, what we used to call naturalized,” Hochrein says, “with minimal lawn area—really more pathways around the house—and native, indigenous plants like low-bush blueberries. I considered flower, fragrance and fruits—edible or for wildlife.”
“We wanted very little formal lawn, more erosion-control grasses,” says Cote. Both men had spent many hours mowing a suburban lawn and wanted their summer hours free from that chore.
The Completed House
All of Cote and Adami’s hard work and careful planning over ten years has paid off in a big way. As you walk up the stone steps into the entry hallway, a ceramic mural customdesigned for this space by Al Jaeger, a noted Deerfield artist, welcomes you. Jaeger is a personal friend of both men—Cote and Adami met at a dinner party he had hosted—and his ceramic work is displayed throughout the house. The warm earthtones of the clay and curvilinear shapes calls to mind the stone walls of the nearby terrace and New Hampshire’s rugged mountains. On the left-facing wall is a coat rack that was made by Adami and Cote from red-oak remnants and oak pegs left over from the timber framing.
A short step up and you’re in the first level living space, a light-filled, open-concept space that includes a kitchen, dining area and living room. A hallway leads to the bathroom and what was originally intended to be the master bedroom (the space became the guest room). A stairway off the hall leads to the second level.
The house is oriented with the largest windows facing south, to take advantage of the sun’s rays. Beautiful, custom triple-paned, Fiberglas®-casement Thermotech® windows line the south-facing wall along the dining and living areas, framing views of the Pawtuckaway hills. Casement-style windows make a tighter seal and save energy, and the coatings on these keep heat in and cold out. The windows are set deep into walls that feature vapor barriers and blown-in Fiberglas insulation, all part of creating a home with a smaller energy “footprint” than most. Cote and Adami solved the problem of how to finish the extradeep sills by tiling them, which created an ideal shelf for interior plantscaping.
“The wall system is wrapped so as to keep all available water vapor in the house instead of going out, because our bodies are more comfortable with some humidity,” Greene notes. “The house walls are twelve inches thick,” which is nearly double that of typical walls.
The large roof overhang allows the low declination of the winter sun’s rays to penetrate inside the home and the hotter, higher summer sun to pass above the roofline to keep the house cool. There are also eighteen inches of insulation in the roof, which makes it “super-insulated.”
“In the winter, you want to allow for as much sun as you can get. It’s not rocket science, just common sense,” says Greene, who once spent a year measuring angles of the sun at each of the solstices in Deerfield. “It’s just basic geometry once you have the angles done.”
“If we had to do it over again and if global warming continues, we would have planned for a central air-conditioning system,” says Cote. “The casement windows don’t really allow for room air-conditioners.”
“Keeping the integrity of the walls and vapor barriers make a through-the-wall airconditioning system not that attractive for us for the few days it’s needed each year,” adds Adami.
A Russian Masonry Heater Adds Thermal Mass
One of the key concepts in high-efficiency passive solar building is creating “thermal mass”—to store the available heat and radiate it throughout the house in the cooler months, and to maintain a constant indoor temperature during the warmer months. Cote and Adami’s house features several types of thermal mass storage: a poured concrete foundation, 1½ inches of concrete plus Italian ceramic tile on the first floor and the fieldstone-faced Russian masonry heater system that ascends to the roof independent of the wood structure.
The heat-storing fireplace dominates the living room and also contributes to the Frank Lloyd Wright-concept of bringing the outside in with the stones harvested from the site by Adami and Cote. The system was designed in collaboration with Thermal Mass, Inc., a Dalton firm specializing in the European tradition of thermal-storage fireplaces. Thermal Mass provided and installed the modular concrete core and base, and mason Fred Cole of Raymond built the stones into the facework.
“He was wonderful,” Adami says about Cole. “He eye-balled everything and would know what stone to place next. We kept piling up the stones, and Fred would just keep asking for more.”
“The way it works is that you stack the wood vertically until you fill the firebox, light it and leave the damper open three [or] four hours, then you close it down and the rocks radiate the heat,” says Adami. “There’s almost no creosote; it’s a fast, clean burn.”
This efficient system provides a gentle, uniform heat for twelve hours or more after the fire goes out. The rocks get warm, but not hot to the touch, so the fireplace is safe in a high-traffic area. The open-concept design for the first floor and loft-like design for the second level allows the warm air to circulate. In a typical heating season, Cote and Adami use just two cords of wood to heat their home.
“The house heats best when it heats from the ground up and rises, warming your feet as it goes up,” says Greene.
An Energy-Efficient Custom Kitchen
The kitchen features granite counters and windowsills from Stone Creations in Northwood, a Bosch® electric dishwasher and a Viking Professional® six-burner propane stove. Adami and Cote had to search for a range model that would have spark ignition for lighting the oven (not the usual glow plug that draws current all the time), but that was the only concession to their power system. “The stove was our reward for doing the tiling ourselves,” says Cote. “Because of our electric budget, this is a propane stove.”
Adami and Cote made all the kitchen cabinetry with wood from their land, dovetailing the joints and using red oak for the faces with interior woods of maple, beech or black birch. There are forty-eight pull-out drawers and shelves. “We put the entire house into a 3-D CAD [computer] program so we had all the dimensions,” says Cote. “It was not much additional effort to lay out the cabinets; we had done the same process in our old home.”
“When you design your own space, we could make things whatever size we needed,” adds Adami, proudly pulling out a storage shelf for cookie sheets.
Other Rooms in the House
A full bath just down the hall from the kitchen features a Swanstone® counter and sink, Hubbardton Forge® light fixtures and tumbled marble flooring. A handcrafted red-oak grab bar near the toilet cleverly incorporates a leftover wooden peg from the framing. “The wood vanity and mirror are made from white birch from the property,” Adami says.
“We wanted the bathroom to have its own, more instant, source of heat,” says Cote, pointing to the Veha® hot-water towel warm-er and radiator, which can be turned on for instant heat. “The masonry heater and radiant floor heat are both slow sources of heat.”
Just off the kitchen, as you move down the hall, is a laundry room with a washer and propane dryer.
The hall, filled with natural light from a row of windows, displays Cote’s photography. Just outside the windows lies a large swale of rocks that seems almost like a Zen rock garden. Adami and Cote carried the rocks there to assist with drainage, and it has become a striking feature of the landscape.
A bedroom is off to the left at the end of the hall on the south-facing side. It was originally thought of as the master bedroom, but as the building progressed, it became the guest room.
The walkout ground level of the house is designed so it could be finished into living space if desired. The concrete foundation is insulated underneath and around all the walls. Radiant heating is in the floor. Windows on the south side allow for plenty of natural light and solar gain in the cold months, while being sunk into the ground makes the level cooler in the summer. For now, this space has become home to Cote’s woodshop, complete with power tools and professional shop vacuum for cleaning up.
Powering the House off the Grid
The ground level has a utility area where the radiant-floor-heating tubes converge near the incredibly compact and aptly named Munchkin® high-efficiency propane boiler. The five-hundred-gallon propane tank that powers the boiler, hot-water heater, clothes dryer and cook stove was buried in the ground so it wouldn’t stand out on the landscape.
If you look up, you see the engineered beams that were specifically designed to support the weight of the first-level concrete floors. The I-joists also are manufactured to be strong and lightweight. The support system was engineered for the size and weight of the house—right down to what type of nails to use.
The controls for the solar electric system, made by OutBack Power Systems, are attached to the wall near the boiler. The power from the two 1,200-watt stationary solar panels near the garage comes to the computerized charge controller, which
Happy with Their Home
Cote and Adami radiate contentment with their house and happily show the book of photographs documenting their adventure in building it. “[Cote and Adami] really did a good job of staying organized and on top of the process,” Greene says. “It was an intense collaboration. In an owner-builder situation, you stop just short of picking up the tools and helping out. We’re neighbors now, and I see Bruce over at the post office or stop by at the green building open house.”
For the last four years, Adami and Cote have generously opened their home to visitors during the New Hampshire Sustainable Energy Association’s annual Green Buildings tour, part of a national event organized by the American Solar Energy Society and held on the same weekend in many states (the first Saturday in October). The men are excited to teach others about what they have learned.
“For some of the visitors, it’s their first time with the technology, and you can see lights going on in their heads,” says Adami. “Before we built, we went through the same process. When you walk into a house like this and see it in real life and realize sure, it works, it really works.”
“I didn’t think I’d have too many power tools, but it turned out we could,” adds Cote. “We definitely went through a lot of learning in the process ourselves. We’re giving back to others what was given to us.”
The house that Cote and Adami built has come to take its place in the neighborhood, nestled into the hilltop, a valued part of the Deerfield community where so many local talents helped it into being. The ten-plus years that Cote and Adami spent learning about their site and building their home is a fine example of a modified old adage: good things come to those who wait, but don’t sit idly by.
