Sustainable Housing Design Hits Mainstream at Local Resorts

Suncadia and Brasada both try to capture public interest by pushing
sustainable design and incredible settings.

by Adrian MacDonald

The Suncadia resort now under construction in Roslyn, Wash. will be the state’s largest master planned “resort community” to be certified “green” by a local home builders sustainable building program.

With three golf courses, a resort village with hotel, and over 3,000 home sites, townhomes, and condominiums, all planned to green specifications, Suncadia will also be one of the most extensive green residential developments in the state, highlighting the kinds of elements that new homebuyers in the Northwest are increasingly demanding.

The driving goal behind Suncadia is to use and preserve the natural character of the site, which sits near the crest of the Cascade Mountains, according to Alex Hillinger, a company spokesman. Of the resort’s 6,400 acres 80% is open space, including a 1200-acre wildlife corridor surrounding the Cle Elum River that is closed to development. The corridor serves to allow migrating wildlife to pass through the resort, and also distances the resort from the Tumble Creek development, a private community of high-end homes with a private golf course.

“The market is starting to demand green,” says Jim Dawson, a land planning consultant for Suncadia and owner of Dawson Associates of Seattle. “Any builder of new homes advertises Built Green elements now. It’s rapidly growing because it’s becoming a given in the marketplace.”

Built Green?, the green certification standard for residential construction run by the Master Builders Association in Bellevue, is outpacing the more commercial-oriented LEED program of the US Green Building Council. Unlike LEED, Built Green certifies master-planned communities as a separate category from single-family homes, remodels, and multifamily buildings.

According to Built Green director, Aaron Adelstein, Suncadia is a pioneer among communities in the Northwest in that its master design guidelines incorporate items directly from the Built Green certification checklist. As a result, any home approved by Suncadia’s design review board automatically receives two out of a possible five stars from Built Green.

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Most of Suncadia’s design requirements on homebuilders focus on how they use the home lot, says Dawson, who sits on the design board. For example, the guidelines strongly discourage grass lawns in favor of landscaping with native plants. While lawns have not yet been outlawed outright, Dawson added, they may be in future. Suncadia plats, and so far the majority of homebuyers, have chosen not to include them.

This is in part due to the heavy restrictions on water use throughout the development. Each homebuyer is allowed to irrigate for only as long as it takes for native landscaping to take root and become self-sufficient with natural weather patterns.

Similarly, homebuyers are not allowed to significantly alter the site’s topography or redivert natural water flows. They must also retain the existing trees on the lot to the extent possible.

Stormwater throughout the resort follows existing topography and water flows as well, said Ray Miller, a project engineer on Suncadia for ESM Consulting Engineers in Cle Elum. Ultimately, the stormwater is collected in infiltration galleries consisting of perforated pipes underground that allow the water to infiltrate back to the soil.

“The character of the soils here is what allows us to do this,” Miller said. “The soils are very permeable. If you had lots of bedrock or clay, like a lot of places in Seattle or King County, you’d have to discharge directly to a ditch and from there to Puget Sound.”

Beyond the site restrictions, homebuilders and buyers have wide flexibility in how they choose to design the homes themselves. “There are thousands of materials, systems, and processes you can use to achieve a star rating,” Dawson says. To move up from the 2-star base level, a home can focus on anything from solar panels to insulated concrete forms to low-VOC carpeting.

These kinds of additions are voluntary, but many of the homes will achieve 3 stars, says Dawson. To get to 4 or 5 stars becomes more difficult, he added, generally requiring 3rd party technical review of advanced heating and air-conditioning systems. For inspiration, one homebuilder at Suncadia, CMI Homes of Bellevue, built a demonstration 5-star home last year that uses wood taken from the site area of the house, and such elements as countertops made from crushed glass bottles.