Architect makes his home ‘green’ and graceful

by Jill Gleeson

Just off Whitehall Road, a few miles from downtown State College, sits the Hudson home. Surrounded by farmlands, it is set far back from the road, on nine pastoral acres. It’s a welcoming house, with traditional white wooden siding and a large front porch.

The snug rooms are decorated with a casual elegance, and the views of Tussey Ridge are second to none. But what makes this dwelling noteworthy is what lies behind the traditional appearance: an earth-friendly, high-performance “green” home.

Randy Hudson, 56, designed the house 15 years ago for his family, which includes his wife, Cynthia, and sons Evan, 26, and Ryan, 23. A principal design architect for Hayes Large Architects, Hudson is intimately acquainted with sustainable design. He is LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) accredited by the U.S. Green Building Council and works out of the only LEED-certified architectural office in the state — Hayes Large’s State College headquarters, where he is a managing partner.

Randy’s firm also designed the first LEED school renovation in Pennsylvania, Wrightsville Elementary School, and the first LEED career technology academy project in this country, in Virginia.

“I hate waste,” Randy says. “And I hate using things you don’t need. If you can spend less money and use fewer resources to do the same thing, I think it’s worth trying and an interesting thing to do. It’s what mathematicians would call an ‘elegant solution’– doing the most with the least.”

He didn’t exactly plan to build the greenest home in Happy Valley. His family, he said, just wanted a place “that would look comfortable in the landscape. And if you look at the street plans of all of the towns in this region, they align with the long, flat-topped ridges we have here. And the farmhouses and rural roads do the same.”

But by building his home parallel to Tussey Ridge, which runs southwest to northeast, Randy said he also happened to give it “almost ideal solar orientation.”

In service to the spectacular views, Randy designed the home to be long and slender, just one and a half rooms wide. Large windows run the length of the southeast face, offering views of the mountains. The rooms on that side, which benefit not just from the vista, but also the sun’s warming rays, are cozy living quarters: a living room, dining room, kitchen and, upstairs, three bedrooms.

The rooms on the other side of the house are service spaces, such as bathrooms and closets. They feature small windows, helping buffer the house against winter’s frigid north wind. As a result of this use of passive solar heat, Randy says, “On a sunny winter day, it can be 10 degrees outside and we don’t need any heat whatsoever from sunrise to sunset, which is amazing. That’s free money.”

On cloudy days, and at night, the Hudsons may light a fire in their fireplace or wood stove; there also is electric baseboard heat throughout the house. It is zoned heating, so the family can shut off the heat in rooms not in use. And the heat the house produces stays in the house — the attic and walls are heavily insulated.

Although large windows with good exposure are ideal in winter, they can make for a too-toasty home in summer. To help keep the living room cool during hot weather, Randy added a front porch to shade the room’s west windows.

The lower winter sun, however, reaches the windows just fine. Every winter solstice, the setting sun shines through them, all the way down the length of the house, finally hitting the back wall of the kitchen. It is a nifty phenomenon that the Hudsons have held parties to celebrate.

There is also a sleeping porch on the second floor, at the east end of the house. On hot summer nights throughout their childhood, Evan, now a lawyer in New York, and Ryan, soon to enter medical school, lined the porch with sleeping bags and snoozed in the open air.

Randy also used casement windows in the house, which are ideal for catching summer breezes. Most intriguingly, the home features a third-floor tower — Hudson’s studio, accessible via a funky spiral staircase — with chimney windows. “We keep those windows open two or three seasons a year, when we need cool air,” he said. “Warm air rises, so it moves through the house, up through the tower. As it’s discharged, cool air is sucked into the house — the tower acts like a passive fan. There is no mechanical equipment, but it acts like a whole-house fan.”

The system works so well that the only structure on the grounds that is air-conditioned is Cynthia’s studio, which is just to the north of the house. A painter who has exhibited at the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, she teaches art classes in the building.

Other eco-friendly touches include the use of renewable and recycled materials, such as cedar exterior siding, cork floors in the second-level bathrooms and 100-year-old heart pine floors on the first level (crafted from logs reclaimed from Florida’s river beds, they are one of the home’s most stunning features).

The brick foundation and slate hearths were manufactured and quarried locally, so less fuel was required for transportation. Outside, the driveway is gravel, not asphalt, to allow rainwater to enter the ground, minimizing runoff. The Hudsons were also careful to plant native species of flora on their property, such as crabapple and cherry trees, viburnum, maples and evergreens and clover; once established, they do not need to be watered. In lieu of a manicured lawn, the family tends natural meadows that require no pesticides, only a twice-yearly mowing.

Wildlife have flocked to these fallow fields, where fallen trees are left to decay, providing homes for all manner of insects, birds and animals. Monarchs and other butterflies, too numerous to count, drift lazily over the pasture’s milkweed in summertime; golden eagles and great horned owls alight in the trees, as do numerous songbirds. From time to time, the Hudsons spy gray foxes frolicking on their land.

“Before we moved here, we lived on Gill Street,” Randy says. “And the greenest thing we could have done is to stay downtown and move into an apartment, because then you’re using the least resources. But the thing that makes me feel better is we’re taking care of the land. We’re not using herbicides or pesticides, we’re not paving stuff, and it’s obviously done a lot for the wildlife. If you’re going to do this, at least do what you can.”

Doing what you can, he says, “is no sacrifice at all.” By forgoing air conditioning and central heating systems, he has, by his own estimation, “saved a great deal both on HVAC first costs and long-term utility costs … the cost to heat, cool and maintain never goes away — 10 years, 50 years, 200 years. Since green houses reduce these costs, it’s money in the bank.

“It’s no more expensive to build green than not to build green. In fact, it should be a lot cheaper, because the first thing you do is not overbuild. There’s an old saying, ‘Better too small for one day than too big for a year.’ We’ve had Thanksgiving dinners where we had to put tables wall to wall, but that’s part of the fun.”

Randy happily debunks the cliché that environmentally friendly means personally uncomfortable.

“We’re not talking about a lot of effort here,” he says. “Yes, we have to do things like open and close windows, but big deal! I guess you could say that storing and loading firewood is an effort, but we enjoy the sight, sound and smell of a real fire in the winter. We like to follow the daylight in our routine; have breakfast where we can watch the sunrise; avoid the heat of the day under a wide porch; have a drink out in the little orchard and watch the stars come out. It’s a lot of fun.”

He pauses, and then adds: “It’s a very sensible thing to do. Hopefully more people will get on it.”