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Dancing in the Moonlight – This contemporary design has an energy all its own.
By Sally Keeney – Advertising Staff Writer
The Herald-Sun – April 22, 1995
The Efland-area home of Charles Lamm and Brenda McCall is awash in natural light both day and on any moonlit night. When the moon is bright, you don’t even need a light on at night to walk around in this contemporary passive solar home, according to the home’s builder Steve Brouillard.
"It is just a wonderful feeling to be in there with all that natural light – it’s almost like being outside," said Brouillard, a self-taught master carpenter who has been building one-of-a-kind custom homes in the Triangle area for the past 20 years.
The Bingham Township home in which Lamm and McCall have been living since January, is the first house for which Brouillard also drafted the blueprints.
"It’s kind of rewarding to have a clear vision before I get started building," Brouillard said about his foray into drafting. Not only was the Lamm/McCall home the first house for which Brouillard did the blueprints, it was also the first house for which Brouillard did not do the contracting. "This was a very technically difficult house to build, and not having to mess around doing a lot of the paperwork involved in contracting freed me up to concentrate on the actual framing," Brouillard said. The contracting was handled by a long-time friend and fellow craftsman, David Tyson of Tyson Contractors Inc.
"Contemporary homes are a sculptural type thing," Brouillard explained. "The actual structure is where the design qualities are, as opposed to a traditional type home where you get spaces and add things to the spaces. In a contemporary home you are glorifying the actual physical structure of the house -- the space itself -- the actual framing is what’s important," Brouillard concluded.
To achieve the space, light and passive solar features Lamm and McCall desired, the house ended up with five different roof lines. "The framing was a difficult time," Brouillard said. "The house has so many different roof lines that except for one little section, there were never more than six rafters in a row that were the same size. Not only were most of the pieces compound cuts, but every piece was a different length, so you really couldn’t get much Henry Ford type production going like you can on a home with a more traditional design."
But Brouillard and his carpenters say they always love a challenge. Master carpenter and certified restoration technologist Alfred Patterson, who has worked with Brouillard for about 20 years, did the cutting while Brouillard and other crew members straddled the roof, putting the precision-cut pieces in place using hammer and nails -- Brouillard doesn’t believe in nail guns.
"Don’t get me wrong," Brouillard explained. "I am not against cutting-edge technology, but my first concern is with the strength of a home, and I just don’t believe you get the same strength from a nail gun as you do a hammer and nail."
The key to all these passive solar homes is that they have some well-placed south-facing mass. In the Lamm/McCall house, this mass is the stucco-covered block wall between the living and kitchen/dining room as well as the concrete stamped Bowmanite floor in the kitchen/dining area. "This mass is what tempers the difference between what the temperature is outside and what it is inside, by slowing that cycle of heat and cold that you get every day," Brouillard explained. The wall and floor keep heat in during the day and let it out at night. The overhangs of the house are designed to work with the windows and south-facing mass to keep the home cooler in summer and warmer in winter. A wood stove in the basement and living room and a back-up propane gas heating system take care of the rest.
What is really nice about passive solar homes for Brouillard is that they all develop their own unique environment. "It’s just a whole different feeling to these homes. They take on their own temperature. It’s not just a change of air like you get in a traditionally heated and cooled home. The whole house becomes a part of this natural heat gain/heat loss cycle," Brouillard said.
Although the Lamm/McCall house has passive solar features, it is not the perfect solar home. The couple wanted their views on the north side more than they wanted to conform to passive solar standards of how much glass should be on the north side of the house, Brouillard said.
"Steve was really good at interpreting the floor plan and the passive solar features we wanted into a really striking house," McCall said. "Steve had a vision, and he helped us to have a vision about this home. The vistas from each window are very beautiful day and night. We feel like we have the outdoors indoors. It’s kind of like having a picture everywhere you look on the wall."
Set on five pretty remote acres in Orange County, just getting the materials to the site, much less taking advantage of all the aspects of the hillside lot, seemed a daunting task to the home owners.
"Steve’s ideas were striking and practical at the same time," McCall said. "He was really good to work with in terms of ability and patience. I had no idea how to set the house on the land to take full advantage of its unique aspects. Steve did all that, plus he helped me to understand what was going on as the home was being built. With five levels of roof line, this was a pretty complex construction. He’s an incredible carpenter."
Although Brouillard is already at work designing another passive-solar home for a couple building just outside Pittsboro, he has promised a set of bedroom furniture to Lamm/McCall. "I enjoy designing anything to do with wood," said Brouillard, who began his woodworking career in Rhode Island after graduating from college with an English and Philosophy degree in 1971. For more information about one-of-a-kind custom built homes or furniture, please call Brouillard at 643-4047.
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