Home Theater
Pb Elemental built a house for two Queen Anne actors to play in. But will there be drama with the neighbors?
Instead, he says, his firm seeks the most efficient, functional materials for a given job, then designs a structure to honestly reflect their attributes. You’ll never find a piece of crown molding in a Pb Elemental house, in other words, but you may see a rough edge where a slab of cement was cut. The firm calls the Lai house PC1—Polycarbonate One—a reference to the translucent plastic that lines the south-facing wall. A tough, ribbed synthetic, polycarbonate is 100 percent recyclable, inexpensive, insulating, and lets in UV-filtered sunlight—cutting down on energy usage. It’s an unusual choice for a private residence, but, provided your taste leans toward seams-on-the-outside modern, it has a certain industrial charm—particularly when you look through it and see the silhouette of clouds or a gull gliding by. When Haizlip and Biddle asked Sam if he’d consider the plastic, he embraced the idea.
Then Sam took things one step further. If they used two sheets of polycarbonate instead of one, he reasoned, he could install LED fixtures in the cavity between them, and, in the evenings, set the place aglow. Today, using Web-enabled touch screens installed at points throughout the house, he and Angie change the lighting scheme at their whim. The smart system also allows them to control house-wide surround sound. (On the quiet rainy morning of my first visit to the Lais’, the lights were a soothing indigo and Iron and Wine played quietly.) If they’re having a party, the Lais set their LEDs to a scarlet red, imbuing PC1 with the dramatic, high-design look of an LA nightclub.
Together, Haizlip, Biddle, and Lai came up with the floor plan, closing off only one space downstairs: a media room in the back, sound-proofed with cork walls, where the family stores the typical electronica along with crates full of plastic toys. From the catwalk-style upstairs hallway, Sam and Angie check up on Manny at play below. From downstairs, they hear the twins waking from their nap in the glass-walled nook attached to the master bedroom. When the twins are old enough to sleep in one of the bedrooms in the rear, this space—which feels private but offers a clear view of the home’s main circulation corridor—will become Angie’s office.
Outside, Sam constructed a fence from black bamboo sticks cleared from the property before the build; the cabinets in the kitchen are also bamboo. By spring he hopes to power his toaster and coffeemaker with energy harnessed from solar panels on the roof. But the environmental pièce de résistance is buried below the deck: a 4,000 ton cistern that collects rainwater, which the Lais use for laundry, toilets, and outdoor faucets. Conserving water was the top goal, says Sam, but he also had a friend install lights underneath the porch’s cedar slats so the outline of the cistern is visible from above, arousing guests’ curiosity. “It’s a reminder of how we use resources,” he says. He mentions a small sign out front above the hose bib that reads “Rainwater, do not drink.” “The plumbing inspector required it,” he says, “but what’s so cool about that little placard is that it fosters all kinds of conversation when people walk by and say ‘What does that mean? How are you using rainwater?’”
Published: February 2009
