What kind of person goes around collecting old used industrial stuff and plans a house to go around it? What about a couple who builds the house around the stuff and wants the house to fit into the rural setting, so they build it not to look like the neighboring houses, but rather the neighboring barns?
Developer David Hall is the collector, and he and his wife, psychotherapist Lisa Dorval, are the couple. He is exactly the kind of person who goes around collecting old used stuff; she maintains that their Newbury home fits into its agrarian setting. She is right. In some cases, it fits in better than some of the surrounding homes.
The house is in many ways a reflection of the family of five. They are all energetic, open, and economical. Both David and Lisa are active proponents of conservation and renewable energy. The house screams out the family’s colors, and they are all green.
It’s also an award-winning design—it won the Boston Society of Architects Design Excellence in Housing Honor Award and was runner up as the Met Home of the Year.
David Hall describes his family’s home somewhat sheepishly as “funky.” The 40-by- 60-foot structure (a standard barn size) is an amalgam of open space and inexpensive but efficient construction materials, including the odd salvage find that Hall picked up somewhere or the other.
When it was built, some ten years ago now, even the architect described it as “not for everyone.” Once inside for any amount of time, however, it’s hard not to be drawn in by the strong character of the house. Even if the industrial feel is not for everyone, the design in itself is practical and economical.
Looking down from the first platform into the main living area of the Hall/Dorval home. Photo by Kevin Harkins
Very little of the interior space is enclosed: You can look from the ground floor up 35 feet from two places, the living area and the foyer, to the peak of the roof. You can look down onto the foyer or living area from the walkways on either of two platforms that form the two top levels of the building.
Architect Keith Moskow says that after the exterior was completed, his business partner in Newburyport (David Hall) called him sounding perplexed. Looking at the 35-foot high open space inside the shell, Hall said, “I think we just built a gym.”
But once the two platforms were in place, it looked a little more like what it was supposed to, if you’re thinking conventionally. Each area was designed to suit its function: eating, sleeping, working, even playing, but there was not one door except on the bathrooms.
After some renovations over the years, however, the house has changed. For one, there are four bedrooms now, with doors that were made out of hard pine shelving from the old Newburyport High School. But there are no traditional closets in the bedrooms that are near the second-level washer/dryer. All clothes are kept in a closet room with the single unit that both washes and dries.
“Everyone’s clothes stay in there,” David Hall says about the combined use space. “If they want laundry, fine. They can go get it.”
Hall says only 11-year-old daughter Ella is not thrilled with this alternative storage arrangement. Except for athletic-type clothing, everything is stored in the closet room. Probably not accidentally, the room where the clothing is stored is off the master bedroom on the other side of the house.
Dad gets the final word. “Bureaus in a kid’s room—not a good idea.”
Dad admits to having issues with laundry.
Environment-Friendly Components
Whether or not it was planned, the house turned out very organic. The foundation is concrete slab on grade. There is no basement; they wanted to avoid mold issues. The radiant heating system in the concrete makes for a toasty floor.
“If you’re heating the floor, you don’t have to heat all the air,” says Rob Howe, who helps out with Hall’s latest venture called Use Less Coal & Oil Company (more about that later). In other words, if your feet are warm, so is the rest of you. As far as efficiency goes, radiant heat waves heat objects rather than the air, as do the rays of the sun. The heat literally radiates to your body. That’s one reason why radiant heat is so efficient in their house, Hall says; if you tried to heat the air in such a large open space, you’d stack up really hot areas of air up at the third level. Radiant heat is also very quiet and involves no airflow through a room, which might carry dust or allergens. Pets even benefit from the toasty floor.
The surface of the concrete was treated with acid stain and dyes from a company called Decosup Inc., so it doesn’t look like concrete at all. The earth tone hues of the floor are enhanced with hand painted designs in the foyer and kitchen. The upper-level floors are wide pine boards heavily coated with polyurethane, and the area is heated through baseboards.
Light steel trusses that support the roof were lifted in place by crane in one day, according to Moskow. The building was sheathed with #2 pine and the inside is lined with galvanized metal. The metal costs about 80 cents per square foot right now, Hall says, and it doesn’t need to be painted.
On the first platform, between the childrens’ rooms and master bedroom, swings hang from a gantry salvaged from an old welding shop. Photo by Kevin Harkins
Ten inches of fiberglass and four inches of rigid polystyrene between the metal and the roof make for an insulation rating of R-50 and assure that radiant heat reflects back into the space. To put this in context, the R-value is the capacity of insulation to reduce air circulation and increase resistance to heat flow. Modern standard
medium-density fiberglass blankets for two-by-four inch walls have a nominal rating of R-11.
The roof is not shingled but is clad with steel plates coated with zinc and aluminum film, called galvalum, which reduce corrosion. It reflects the sky color, which Hall says is kind of cool.
There are no windows on the north side of the house, no openings at all except the front door, but the south and west sides are practically nothing but glass (the east side is work and garage space). Not only are there great views to woods and a salt marsh, but also the design allows for passive solar gain.
At the one spot where there is no window on the south wall, there is a slab of granite—7,500 pounds, two feet thick, and six feet in diameter. It’s a hearth, of sorts, in that a fireplace sits on it. The couple planned to have an open hearth, but safety concerns made them think again.
Throughout the home, they used recycled Anderson windows from 1978. The windows needed to be painted, so Hall rates the convenience a D-minus. He gives high marks for efficiency, though, and they were relatively inexpensive.
Incorporating more of his finds, the exposed structural steel supporting the two platforms was salvaged from the Boston Whaler plant in Rockland, Massachusetts. On the first platform is a gantry and hoist that moves both vertically and horizontally along beams and has a rope swing attached to it. The gantry was salvaged from an old welding shop. This is where indoor play reaches new levels.
Hall says they want to get “some kind of funky couch that just hasn’t described itself to us yet” for the space below the gantry, or to suspend from the rope. With Hall, the latter seems more likely.
The bathtub in one of the two full baths on this first platform was found by the side of the road and brought home. On the second platform, a fire escape landing from an industrial plant was used as a suspended walkway between two storage/working spaces.
The aforementioned fireplace is fed by outside air, which improves oxygen delivery and causes the wood to burn hotter. Hall picked up the hood, which he refers to as a “Sanford and Son special,” eight years ago for $100. It came out of an old factory in Lawrence.
The large light fixture hanging in the foyer was a reject from a recent rest area rehab on Rte. 495 in Merrimac. Hall picked it up at a metal scrap yard where the contractor had left it. “It’s close relationships with contractors over the years that has netted me that fun stuff,” says Hall about his salvage finds.
In this minimalist setting, creative storage solutions that fit are a must. With two adults and three children (Ella has two brothers, Jacob and Emmett), the cost of minimalist design could be clutter. However, a cleverly designed space to the left of the front door holds floor to ceiling storage for shoes, coats, and athletic equipment. It, like most other rooms in the house, has motion-activated lighting, meaning that the energy often
wasted by children forgetting to switch off lights is not wasted in this house.
IKEA cabinets and hanging metal shelves complement the open kitchen. Photo by Kevin Harkins
There is also a shelf for each child near the kitchen. This is where backpacks, bags, and other items that might just get dumped on the floor should live. Dorval says anything left on the floor—whether it is by child or adult—goes into a drawer. It costs 50 cents to get the item back. “It’s fair game on everyone,” Dorval explains.
The kitchen features IKEA fixtures. Hanging metal dish racks, and roomy metal drawers complement the smaller glass-fronted cabinets affixed high along the rear wall.
The cost, according to Hall, was 60 percent less than some of the other better quality kitchens on the market.
Clean Energy
Last November, Hall and Dorval were able to cancel their service with an oil company. In addition to a small solar panel that had previously offset electricity usage, they now have a new system using solar thermal tubes, called a Solar Thermal Module, which runs from a small shed in the yard. It is configured to provide hot water and space heating for the house, which is about 4,200 square feet including the workshop next to the garage.
Harnessing energy from the sun to generate electricity is known as photovoltaics (or PV). Solar thermal devices use the direct heat from the sun to produce concentrated heat at useful temperatures; the most common use is heating water.
“It actually is a remarkably efficient way to get hot water for a house,” Hall says. “Unfortunately, thermal got a bad rap in the 1970s because early systems were prone to seal failure resulting in frozen pipes and whatnot. This new breed of evacuated tubes is very reliable.”
In the freestanding shed are stored 500 gallons of water, which is kept at 130°F. Water is exchanged between the tank in the shed (the shed’s insulation rating is R-80) and the water tank in the house, thus eliminating the need for a boiler. “It’s the equivalent of a 100,000 BTU boiler when the sun is out,” Hall notes.
The module is one of the clean energy concepts provided by Use Less Coal & Oil Company (ULCOC). Howe says it would take the average homeowner ten years to pay for the system, and the cost over that time would be lower than other energy sources. After that, the system is good for at least ten more years of solar energy.
Another concept used in the Hall/Dorval home is thermal window covers that are raised and lowered as needed to conserve heat. As cold air moves down the inside of the glass, the covers arrest and keep it out of the room.
“The convection shift changes dramatically (when the covers are down),” Hall adds. “The solar thing out in the yard is fun and sexy, but this is cheap.” He says his models are 50 percent of the cost of comparable products from large manufacturers of window covers.
When the house was built ten years ago, the area that is now the laundry/closet space, the master bedroom, and a full bath on the first platform was open space and a sleeping porch. Last summer, the area was enclosed—using plenty of glass in the interior bedroom wall to maintain the light—and segmented into these new rooms. The family moved back in mid-November following the renovations. Not long after, Hall and Dorval held an open house featuring the clean energy concepts that ULCOC is developing.
Green in the Community, Too
David Hall came to Newburyport in 1981 after graduating from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in zoology. He confesses that he had no particular mission in mind when he got there, and was, in fact, considering a career as a welder or an EMT. With nothing else on his plate, Hall began taking care of ten buildings in town that were owned by his father and his father’s partner—the original Hall and Moskow. He says he became involved in the acquisition of multi-family real estate from 1982 to 1985 through the generosity of those two partners. When an old tannery in Newburyport came up for sale in 1985, he jumped at it.
Hall initially thought about an inexpensive light industrial use, but he saw the need in town for light retail and service spaces that also offered parking. The Tannery Mall was born.
Last year, Hall & Moskow added to the mall with the opening of Mill No. 5, which is across Water Street from the other four renovated tannery buildings. It, too, was modeled on a barn—a pole barn, which was used to store coal along the Merrimack. This building, unlike the others, was not a renovation. It was built from scratch on land that used to be an oil tank farm.
The multiple solar arrays on the roof of The Tannery buildings 1 and 3 and in the parking lot qualify the mall as “green” according to the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, and make it the second largest solar powered business in Massachusetts. The new building also is supplied by passive solar power and gas-fired radiant heat.
In addition, the company truck, some of its construction equipment, and Hall’s personal vehicle all run on biodiesel, a vegetable-based diesel fuel.
Back at the house, Dorval says, “Go upstairs and sit on the toilet…you know, with the seat down.” A long horizontal window in the full bathroom affords a view of the woods and marsh at the back of the house. A skylight affords a view of the clouds blowing by. Both views are also available from the restored bathtub—the one that was found by the side of the road.
David Hall says what he likes best about his home is how bright the space is and how it gets the winter sun. Lisa Doral likes best the laundry room and the pigmented plaster on the walls.
“We just added masonry dye to the plaster that went on the blue board. When you apply it you get wall color, it just has to be sealed,” Hall explains.
There is a concession to at least one child, however: seven-year-old Emmett’s room has one wall painted in Fence Green. That is the color specially mixed by California Paints in Cambridge for the Green Monster at Fenway Park.
David’s mother Fran Hall says it will always be a work in progress. She adds that if you come back in a week, things probably will have changed. “This is an incredibly energetic family.”
Highlights of Energy Efficiency at the Hall/Dorval Home
Clean energy concepts by Use Less Oil & Coal Co.
• Thermal window covers
• Manual trash masher
• Solar photovoltaic panels
• Solar thermal module
Alternative building features
• Reused construction materials
• Radiant heated concrete floors on ground floor
• On demand faucet with foot pedal, powered by the existing water pressure in the home
• Combustion air delivery stove
• Electronic ballast quick start fluorescent lighting
Finishing touches
• Second floor sleeping porch
• Pigment-dyed plaster
• Acid stain and dyes give marble-like finish
to concrete floor (www.decosup.com)
• High efficiency washer/dryer unit:
two functions in one machine
(www.creativelaundry.com)
Living the Green Life in Newbury – Winter 2007
Developer David Hall is the collector, and he and his wife, psychotherapist Lisa Dorval, are the couple. He is exactly the kind of person who goes around collecting old used stuff; she maintains that their Newbury home fits into its agrarian setting. She is right. In some cases, it fits in better than some of the surrounding homes.
The house is in many ways a reflection of the family of five. They are all energetic, open, and economical. Both David and Lisa are active proponents of conservation and renewable energy. The house screams out the family’s colors, and they are all green.
It’s also an award-winning design—it won the Boston Society of Architects Design Excellence in Housing Honor Award and was runner up as the Met Home of the Year.
David Hall describes his family’s home somewhat sheepishly as “funky.” The 40-by- 60-foot structure (a standard barn size) is an amalgam of open space and inexpensive but efficient construction materials, including the odd salvage find that Hall picked up somewhere or the other.
When it was built, some ten years ago now, even the architect described it as “not for everyone.” Once inside for any amount of time, however, it’s hard not to be drawn in by the strong character of the house. Even if the industrial feel is not for everyone, the design in itself is practical and economical.
Looking down from the first platform into the main living area of the Hall/Dorval home. Photo by Kevin Harkins
Very little of the interior space is enclosed: You can look from the ground floor up 35 feet from two places, the living area and the foyer, to the peak of the roof. You can look down onto the foyer or living area from the walkways on either of two platforms that form the two top levels of the building.
Architect Keith Moskow says that after the exterior was completed, his business partner in Newburyport (David Hall) called him sounding perplexed. Looking at the 35-foot high open space inside the shell, Hall said, “I think we just built a gym.”
But once the two platforms were in place, it looked a little more like what it was supposed to, if you’re thinking conventionally. Each area was designed to suit its function: eating, sleeping, working, even playing, but there was not one door except on the bathrooms.
After some renovations over the years, however, the house has changed. For one, there are four bedrooms now, with doors that were made out of hard pine shelving from the old Newburyport High School. But there are no traditional closets in the bedrooms that are near the second-level washer/dryer. All clothes are kept in a closet room with the single unit that both washes and dries.
“Everyone’s clothes stay in there,” David Hall says about the combined use space. “If they want laundry, fine. They can go get it.”
Hall says only 11-year-old daughter Ella is not thrilled with this alternative storage arrangement. Except for athletic-type clothing, everything is stored in the closet room. Probably not accidentally, the room where the clothing is stored is off the master bedroom on the other side of the house.
Dad gets the final word. “Bureaus in a kid’s room—not a good idea.”
Dad admits to having issues with laundry.
Environment-Friendly Components
Whether or not it was planned, the house turned out very organic. The foundation is concrete slab on grade. There is no basement; they wanted to avoid mold issues. The radiant heating system in the concrete makes for a toasty floor.
“If you’re heating the floor, you don’t have to heat all the air,” says Rob Howe, who helps out with Hall’s latest venture called Use Less Coal & Oil Company (more about that later). In other words, if your feet are warm, so is the rest of you. As far as efficiency goes, radiant heat waves heat objects rather than the air, as do the rays of the sun. The heat literally radiates to your body. That’s one reason why radiant heat is so efficient in their house, Hall says; if you tried to heat the air in such a large open space, you’d stack up really hot areas of air up at the third level. Radiant heat is also very quiet and involves no airflow through a room, which might carry dust or allergens. Pets even benefit from the toasty floor.
The surface of the concrete was treated with acid stain and dyes from a company called Decosup Inc., so it doesn’t look like concrete at all. The earth tone hues of the floor are enhanced with hand painted designs in the foyer and kitchen. The upper-level floors are wide pine boards heavily coated with polyurethane, and the area is heated through baseboards.
Light steel trusses that support the roof were lifted in place by crane in one day, according to Moskow. The building was sheathed with #2 pine and the inside is lined with galvanized metal. The metal costs about 80 cents per square foot right now, Hall says, and it doesn’t need to be painted.
On the first platform, between the childrens’ rooms and master bedroom, swings hang from a gantry salvaged from an old welding shop. Photo by Kevin Harkins
Ten inches of fiberglass and four inches of rigid polystyrene between the metal and the roof make for an insulation rating of R-50 and assure that radiant heat reflects back into the space. To put this in context, the R-value is the capacity of insulation to reduce air circulation and increase resistance to heat flow. Modern standard
medium-density fiberglass blankets for two-by-four inch walls have a nominal rating of R-11.
The roof is not shingled but is clad with steel plates coated with zinc and aluminum film, called galvalum, which reduce corrosion. It reflects the sky color, which Hall says is kind of cool.
There are no windows on the north side of the house, no openings at all except the front door, but the south and west sides are practically nothing but glass (the east side is work and garage space). Not only are there great views to woods and a salt marsh, but also the design allows for passive solar gain.
At the one spot where there is no window on the south wall, there is a slab of granite—7,500 pounds, two feet thick, and six feet in diameter. It’s a hearth, of sorts, in that a fireplace sits on it. The couple planned to have an open hearth, but safety concerns made them think again.
Throughout the home, they used recycled Anderson windows from 1978. The windows needed to be painted, so Hall rates the convenience a D-minus. He gives high marks for efficiency, though, and they were relatively inexpensive.
Incorporating more of his finds, the exposed structural steel supporting the two platforms was salvaged from the Boston Whaler plant in Rockland, Massachusetts. On the first platform is a gantry and hoist that moves both vertically and horizontally along beams and has a rope swing attached to it. The gantry was salvaged from an old welding shop. This is where indoor play reaches new levels.
Hall says they want to get “some kind of funky couch that just hasn’t described itself to us yet” for the space below the gantry, or to suspend from the rope. With Hall, the latter seems more likely.
The bathtub in one of the two full baths on this first platform was found by the side of the road and brought home. On the second platform, a fire escape landing from an industrial plant was used as a suspended walkway between two storage/working spaces.
The aforementioned fireplace is fed by outside air, which improves oxygen delivery and causes the wood to burn hotter. Hall picked up the hood, which he refers to as a “Sanford and Son special,” eight years ago for $100. It came out of an old factory in Lawrence.
The large light fixture hanging in the foyer was a reject from a recent rest area rehab on Rte. 495 in Merrimac. Hall picked it up at a metal scrap yard where the contractor had left it. “It’s close relationships with contractors over the years that has netted me that fun stuff,” says Hall about his salvage finds.
In this minimalist setting, creative storage solutions that fit are a must. With two adults and three children (Ella has two brothers, Jacob and Emmett), the cost of minimalist design could be clutter. However, a cleverly designed space to the left of the front door holds floor to ceiling storage for shoes, coats, and athletic equipment. It, like most other rooms in the house, has motion-activated lighting, meaning that the energy often
wasted by children forgetting to switch off lights is not wasted in this house.
IKEA cabinets and hanging metal shelves complement the open kitchen. Photo by Kevin Harkins
There is also a shelf for each child near the kitchen. This is where backpacks, bags, and other items that might just get dumped on the floor should live. Dorval says anything left on the floor—whether it is by child or adult—goes into a drawer. It costs 50 cents to get the item back. “It’s fair game on everyone,” Dorval explains.
The kitchen features IKEA fixtures. Hanging metal dish racks, and roomy metal drawers complement the smaller glass-fronted cabinets affixed high along the rear wall.
The cost, according to Hall, was 60 percent less than some of the other better quality kitchens on the market.
Clean Energy
Last November, Hall and Dorval were able to cancel their service with an oil company. In addition to a small solar panel that had previously offset electricity usage, they now have a new system using solar thermal tubes, called a Solar Thermal Module, which runs from a small shed in the yard. It is configured to provide hot water and space heating for the house, which is about 4,200 square feet including the workshop next to the garage.
Harnessing energy from the sun to generate electricity is known as photovoltaics (or PV). Solar thermal devices use the direct heat from the sun to produce concentrated heat at useful temperatures; the most common use is heating water.
“It actually is a remarkably efficient way to get hot water for a house,” Hall says. “Unfortunately, thermal got a bad rap in the 1970s because early systems were prone to seal failure resulting in frozen pipes and whatnot. This new breed of evacuated tubes is very reliable.”
In the freestanding shed are stored 500 gallons of water, which is kept at 130°F. Water is exchanged between the tank in the shed (the shed’s insulation rating is R-80) and the water tank in the house, thus eliminating the need for a boiler. “It’s the equivalent of a 100,000 BTU boiler when the sun is out,” Hall notes.
The module is one of the clean energy concepts provided by Use Less Coal & Oil Company (ULCOC). Howe says it would take the average homeowner ten years to pay for the system, and the cost over that time would be lower than other energy sources. After that, the system is good for at least ten more years of solar energy.
Another concept used in the Hall/Dorval home is thermal window covers that are raised and lowered as needed to conserve heat. As cold air moves down the inside of the glass, the covers arrest and keep it out of the room.
“The convection shift changes dramatically (when the covers are down),” Hall adds. “The solar thing out in the yard is fun and sexy, but this is cheap.” He says his models are 50 percent of the cost of comparable products from large manufacturers of window covers.
When the house was built ten years ago, the area that is now the laundry/closet space, the master bedroom, and a full bath on the first platform was open space and a sleeping porch. Last summer, the area was enclosed—using plenty of glass in the interior bedroom wall to maintain the light—and segmented into these new rooms. The family moved back in mid-November following the renovations. Not long after, Hall and Dorval held an open house featuring the clean energy concepts that ULCOC is developing.
Green in the Community, Too
David Hall came to Newburyport in 1981 after graduating from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in zoology. He confesses that he had no particular mission in mind when he got there, and was, in fact, considering a career as a welder or an EMT. With nothing else on his plate, Hall began taking care of ten buildings in town that were owned by his father and his father’s partner—the original Hall and Moskow. He says he became involved in the acquisition of multi-family real estate from 1982 to 1985 through the generosity of those two partners. When an old tannery in Newburyport came up for sale in 1985, he jumped at it.
Hall initially thought about an inexpensive light industrial use, but he saw the need in town for light retail and service spaces that also offered parking. The Tannery Mall was born.
Last year, Hall & Moskow added to the mall with the opening of Mill No. 5, which is across Water Street from the other four renovated tannery buildings. It, too, was modeled on a barn—a pole barn, which was used to store coal along the Merrimack. This building, unlike the others, was not a renovation. It was built from scratch on land that used to be an oil tank farm.
The multiple solar arrays on the roof of The Tannery buildings 1 and 3 and in the parking lot qualify the mall as “green” according to the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, and make it the second largest solar powered business in Massachusetts. The new building also is supplied by passive solar power and gas-fired radiant heat.
In addition, the company truck, some of its construction equipment, and Hall’s personal vehicle all run on biodiesel, a vegetable-based diesel fuel.
Back at the house, Dorval says, “Go upstairs and sit on the toilet…you know, with the seat down.” A long horizontal window in the full bathroom affords a view of the woods and marsh at the back of the house. A skylight affords a view of the clouds blowing by. Both views are also available from the restored bathtub—the one that was found by the side of the road.
David Hall says what he likes best about his home is how bright the space is and how it gets the winter sun. Lisa Doral likes best the laundry room and the pigmented plaster on the walls.
“We just added masonry dye to the plaster that went on the blue board. When you apply it you get wall color, it just has to be sealed,” Hall explains.
There is a concession to at least one child, however: seven-year-old Emmett’s room has one wall painted in Fence Green. That is the color specially mixed by California Paints in Cambridge for the Green Monster at Fenway Park.
David’s mother Fran Hall says it will always be a work in progress. She adds that if you come back in a week, things probably will have changed. “This is an incredibly energetic family.”
Highlights of Energy Efficiency at the Hall/Dorval Home
Clean energy concepts by Use Less Oil & Coal Co.
• Thermal window covers
• Manual trash masher
• Solar photovoltaic panels
• Solar thermal module
Alternative building features
• Reused construction materials
• Radiant heated concrete floors on ground floor
• On demand faucet with foot pedal, powered by the existing water pressure in the home
• Combustion air delivery stove
• Electronic ballast quick start fluorescent lighting
Finishing touches
• Second floor sleeping porch
• Pigment-dyed plaster
• Acid stain and dyes give marble-like finish
to concrete floor (www.decosup.com)
• High efficiency washer/dryer unit:
two functions in one machine
(www.creativelaundry.com)