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East Meets West

Green Living in the East Bay

Danielle Zitoun

    As the daughter of a New York architectural designer, Sallie Lang learned a thing or two about good home design while growing up.
She brought that knowledge—and the aspiration of becoming a builder—to the Bay Area where she serendipitously connected with Paul Discoe, a Zen priest who studied Buddhist temple building in Japan before starting his own company in Oakland, Joinery Structures, which managed the construction of Oracle mogul Larry Ellison’s imperial palace in Woodside. Under Discoe’s tutelage, Lang became immersed in the ways of Japanese design; an art, not to mention culture, that was previously foreign to her. “That was an amazing education,” she says.
    After the epic seven-year Ellison project was completed, Lang branched out to form her own Oakland-based Bliss Building & Associates. Given that the work of Lang’s mentor was so prodigious, it’s not surprising she would bring that same aesthetic to her first solo project—a spec home, a design that she hadn’t yet contemplated but whose only criteria was to exemplify the highest standards of green living.
    Lang and her five-woman investment team, Green Lane Development, scouted Oakland for the ideal piece of open land to create Lang’s vision. “My business partner called and said she found a site in the Oakland Hills with phenomenal views of the Bay, but with a ‘gentle down slope,’ ” she laughs. “The property was in fact a very steep 37 percent slope.”
    Lang can laugh about it now, but during the initial construction process, the situation was anything but funny as the crew watched helplessly from hundreds of feet down the vertical terrain while crooks made off with a generator and tools. “After that, we had to chain everything we couldn’t take down with us to trees,” she explains.
    Fortunately, there was no lack of mature live oaks and laurels that survived the 1991 fires to accommodate this endeavor of self-preservation. To avoid other foreseeable hassles related to the lot’s sheer slope, Lang had the house’s frame prefabricated to her exacting measurements in the form of 10-by-10 wall sections that were constructed in a warehouse in Canada. “Framing it ourselves on the steep site would have been a nightmare. It would have taken longer with us hanging off a mountain, plus, prefabrication is so much more efficient because the wood is kiln-dried ahead of time, making it stronger. Subsequently, the waste is finger-jointed into nonstructural pieces so that there is virtually nothing to throw away when the project is completed, which is not the case when you frame something on site,” explains Lang.
    The finished home, which is fixed to the side of the hill, is so secluded that someone driving past the home would only see the garage and have no idea there is a deceptive 4,000-plus square feet of living space, including three bedrooms, four full and two half baths, within the four sublevels. Ironically, despite the grand scale of the house, its monthly utility bill is that of a significantly smaller home, thanks to green components that include radiant heating, an overabundance of insulation, heavy-duty double-paned windows, a galvanized steel/aluminum roof (guaranteed 60 years) and sustainable bamboo flooring throughout.
    By incorporating the maximum allotment of windows to the south- and west-facing walls—which do not abut the hillside—the home is heated naturally when the sun is out and requires no artificial lighting in the daylight hours. During colder months, Lang says, “All the residents need to do is heat the master bedroom on the third sublevel with the radiant heat, and that’s pretty much all the place needs to get warm.”
    Upon entry, guests are immediately introduced to the home’s Japanese flavor with the oversized sliding glass and mahogany wood shoji front door that serves both aesthetic and functional purposes. “While most people don’t have the room for a sliding front door of any size, let alone one measuring 4 feet wide, sliders are far more practical than doors that swing because of what you can carry through, like furniture,” she notes.
    Whether it’s the ample keyless front door, the inclusion of a sizeable dumbwaiter that can transport items from the garage down to any level, the use of felled trees or recycled wood to create the home’s wooden trim and adornments, or the reclaimed beams that she personally hand planed, it is her attention to detail—an attribute often lost in most home construction projects, never mind a spec home—that make Lang’s work stand out. Despite lingering on the market for eight months, the completed house was finally purchased by a couple who shared Lang’s passion for conscientious environmental design—and who grilled Lang extensively on the house’s greenness before buying it. Having learned from her Zen priest-home builder mentor, Lang knew that nothing worth doing should ever be done in haste. In the end, Lang’s patience paid off greatly for her bottom line, but more importantly for her, her clients and the environment.