The Beauty of Net Zero
Consumers are embracing simplicity for elegance in modern design for “net zeroing” their homes.
According to 27 East, bigger-is-better showmanship is finally going the way of the Hummer and fountains in swimming pools. Today, homes are more likely to be powered by solar, tightly insulated, heated with geothermal, smaller in scale, and getting closer to net zero carbon emissions (when a house doesn’t use more energy than it generates.)
All of this common sense design couldn’t have come at a better time. In 2019, residential energy use in the U.S. accounted for roughly 20 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. This year, the building sector worldwide used 32 percent of all energy generated (more than one third of that for heating and cooling alone).
The first thing that surprised me when I visited a fully net zero house this January was how, well, normal it was. Normal in a fabulously elegant, modernist East Hampton kind of way, that is. As Marc Cléjan, founder of Modern Net Zero put it, “You don’t see the green.”
Cléjan, who uses “net zeroing” as a verb, and has been building beautiful, carbon neutral homes like this one since 2013, says that when it comes to beauty and sustainability, “Most people don’t know they can have their cake and eat it too.”
It also surprised me that the lights had been left on and the heat was set to 68 even though the owner hadn’t been there in weeks. After a lifetime of being scolded for leaving lights on, it was kind of astonishing that this house wasn’t wasting energy. “When a house is really efficient, you don’t need to worry so much about electricity. You can, ‘Set it and forget it,’” says Cléjan.
The first step to building to a net zero home is good orientation, siting a home on the property for windows to take advantage of the sun in order to create “passive” solar heating.
