Custom-home builder Josh Wynne of Sarasota recently won a Best in American Living award at the International Builders Show in Las Vegas for his two-building residential project, known as the Codding Cottage, on Laurel Street in Sarasota. Harold Bubil spoke with Wynne about the award and his business of building sustainable houses.
Q: Did you have an idea that you would win multiple awards for this project when you started it?
A: I didn’t build the house to win awards, and I didn’t build it to be the greenest house in the state. It was about building the best, most sustainable house for my client’s budget. It was just about building the best house we could possibly build with the available technologies.
Q: You said you wanted to build the best house for the client’s budget. How did you achieve that?
A: Well, it was hard. We had to get outside the box, which is what I think made that house so special. If I had an open budget, we probably wouldn’t have been as good as we were on it. It was all about efficiency. Efficiency in systems management, efficiency in time. In order to make it profitable for me on a tight budget, I had to get it done in a really short amount of time, considering what it is. So aside from being energy-efficient, we had to be cost-efficient. My subs (subcontractors) had to work efficiently. We had to be efficient with materials management and with our waste.
So really efficiency was the key to getting it done, and, ironically, the reason it is so celebrated is because the house itself is so efficient.
Q: When you got that award, how did it make you feel?
A: I was a little surprised, actually. On a national level, it is a humble, quaint, little house house, and obviously I was excited and a little bit humbled. I just never anticipated anything like that when I started that project. It felt great!
Q: The Codding Cottage also won a Grand Aurora award at the Southeast Building Conference last summer, and I believe it is still among the greenest houses in the state.
A: On the LEED scale, it is the highest in the state by a long shot. I don’t think there is another house over 100 (points). There are multiple “platinum” houses in Florida, but most of them in the 70 and 80 range. That one ended up at 110. I think there are three in the country that are higher.
I’ve got one under construction now that’s registered that should be significantly higher. It may be the next “highest in the country.” It should be done in May or June. It is highly custom, so there are some variables that will affect the time line.
Q: What is the consumer attitude toward green building at this point in time?
A: I can answer that question as it relates to me. Obviously I am building green homes, but I don’t necessarily consider myself a green builder. I feel like I am building responsible, sustainable homes that make sense for the client.
There are a lot of people who have abused that word green, and have taken it on as a marketing strategy or a sales pitch, where really, my intent is and always has been to just build the best house I can build. And in doing so, I feel like those technologies in energy reduction, water reduction, durability — those are my responsibilities to my clients. And as long as we are doing that, I feel like it’s necessary to do third-party certification for the client’s protection. And we just end up high on these third-party certification scales.
I think my clients’ reaction to what we call green building is a positive one because we don’t do it for the sake of doing it. Everything has to equal value to the client. I am able to show value to the client for every dollar we spend.
Now I will tell you that some of my clients have certain wants that you can’t necessarily equate a value to. Some of them are really interested in water conservation, some more in energy conservation where there may not be a high-value payback, but there is a feel-good factor. They are interested in doing it for the sake of doing it. Not necessarily on my part, but their own wants and wishes.
So most of it is really value-based. I show the customer where it equals value in their resale. Value in performance. Value in lifestyle. And they either to do or they don’t. And mostly they’ve done it.
Q: How has the Codding Cottage been working out in terms of energy bills?
A: It’s been really good. I think his average, with a full-time person the carriage house, in the summer, for the two buildings was around $100. It’s 4,400 square feet worth of building; under air it’s 3,500. Pretty impressive. According to the Energy Star rating I got, it would have been $440 (if built just to code). Which makes sense, because it had a HERS (Home Energy Rating System) index of 27, so it should be about a quarter of what the average is.
Q: Is there anything your learned from that house in terms of what technologies pay back better than others, that would affect the recommendations you make to future clients?
A: Absolutely. I think if you don’t grow on each project, you are dying as a business. There is a lot of technology that is just better, already. The green product lines have blown up; there are a lot more options out there. They have pushed the technology. Solar, in particular, has gotten a lot better. There are better insulators. Better windows. Some new concepts in building designs. There is just a lot more to choose from.
The next house that I do should have a HERS index of about a negative 25 to a negative 50.
Q: So you are going to have that electric meter spinning backwards?
A: Absolutely. Definitely. And that house has no attic. It is an exposed-beam-and-decking attic, like a Sarasota school of architecture house. And that one has solid-panel foam on top of the roof deck.
Q: Where are we on the evolution of sustainable building. Is it starting to peak, or are there a lot of improvements that can still be made?
A: In my own mind, I’m about 10 percent of the way there. I’ve got some ideas; I’m probably going to have to build my own house in order to incorporate my ideas, because they are pretty wild. But I think zero-carbon houses are around the corner.
Q: So no carbon footprint whatsoever?
A: Correct.
Q: What is your wildest idea?
A: I can’t tell you. But I have a couple of projects on the drawing board right now that are really going to push the envelope hard. We are close to a 100 percent recycled house, and close to a zero carbon-footprint house in the next two years.