Sustainable/Explainable: Green with Envy

Building fit for a green house and The Greenhouse Tavern
Photo courtesy of Ryan Kurtz Photography

Every town is teeming with consignment shops, garage sales and commercial resale outlets. We are tantalized with marketing argot like "gently used" and "certified pre-owned" for everything from Cadillacs to cardigans. In cyberspace, eBay and Craigslist have become titans of secondary commerce. As a green geek, I heartily approve.

I think of this approach to consumerism as a gateway drug to sustainable living. It's already hard-coded into our subconscious and no new behavior need be learned. Look closer, and it is the most simple of green concepts: don't use raw materials, energy, labor and transportation resources to make anything new when you have already expended these on an existing product. 

As green building professionals and in the LEED building system, we use phrases like "reuse of existing building stock", "embodied energy" and "embodied carbon". As an interior designer, I focus on creative reuse and "upcycling" of furnishing and materials. 

Garbage to Glorious 

The owners of The Greenhouse Tavern had a vision for an eclectic interior that celebrated our Cuyahoga Valley heritage as much as their menu did, and an idea that the restaurant would interact with the community far beyond its four walls. I was given a unique opportunity to help develop these notions, bringing actual elements from the neighborhoods that surround downtown and weave them into the interior. Restaurateurs have long bought used furniture and equipment to save capital, but this was a conscious effort to make everything possible an overtly local piece. There was a big difference for me buying historic barn lumber from a Civil War-era barn in Jefferson, Ohio, versus going through a lumber broker and getting reclaimed barn wood collected from all over the US. Take a look in the barroom and you will see an antique church divider screen donated by Ohio Authority editor Sarah Sphar. [Photo courtesy of Ryan Kurtz Photography]

A Bright Idea

Chef/owners Jonathon Sawyer and Jonathan Seeholzer wanted dramatic lighting in the main dining room, but finding a green, cost-effective solution took a few creative spins. I contacted the Ohio City Bike Co-op and we worked on finding scrap bike wheels that would fit the bill – namely ones that could not be salvaged for use on a bicycle. This great organization takes old bikes and fixes them, creating affordable bicycle options for locals.

The rest was engineering how to put these monsters together and selecting an appropriate commercial eco-fabric for shades. I wanted them to be subtle, so only on second glance did you see they were bike wheels. The resulting luminaires were installed in the same locations as the old building's original pendants with some of the original trims. They are lit with state-of-the-art dimming LED modules (from Cleveland's GE).