Shannon Madison purchased her first home when she was a 24-year-old engineer, using Apple stock. The home was a simple three-bedroom, two-bath post-war ranch in Mountain View. But one husband and two kids later, it seemed small and, quite frankly, “I was sick of it.”
Besides, by then she and her husband, Giles Douglas, were both engineers at Google — and it was easy to dream big. And dream green.
They started looking in Palo Alto, but realized that what they wanted most they already had — a corner lot, a dead-end street, easy walking distance to downtown cafes and Caltrain. So they stayed put and started from the ground up.
“If you’re going to build a house from scratch,” Shannon said. “Why not build it right?”
Google offered incentives for employees who install solar power systems. And Giles had just seen Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”
“That scared my husband into doing as much as possible as green as possible,” Shannon said.
They hired architect Forrest Linebarger from Vox Design Group, a Mountain View firm just a few blocks from their property that specializes in green design.
And they ended up using much more green technology than just solar power. Along with such standard green features as skylights and Vetrazzo countertops made of recycled glass and fly ash cement, they built a 10,000-gallon rainwater collection cistern and drilled for thermal gas under their property to heat and cool the home.
“We had derricks in the front yard drilling the wells for a couple of weeks,” she said. “I told neighbors I decided against the solar and was drilling for oil instead. That’s when oil was over $100 a barrel.”
The house was on track to receive a 242-point GreenPoint rating from the Berkeley-based Build It Green group, a score Shannon said would make it the “second-greenest” house in Mountain View.
The couple decided on a Craftsman-style design and were pleased that “we had to make very few concessions when we started adding the green stuff.”
They got their vaulted ceilings on the second floor and reclaimed walnut floors downstairs. The only thing she lacks, she said, is adequate storage space. Huge heating and cooling ducts and other equipment took part of their master closet as well as storage under the eaves, she said.
And she splurged on some anti-green indulgences — a wine refrigerator being one of them. “And there’s nothing green about the jacuzzi,” she said. “But I figured I had solar panels to make up for it.”
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Do you have any info on where the door w/ the glass/resin insert with leaves is available?
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