Your Eco-Friendly Dream Home

By Richard Martin, 9-25-07

	Caption: Plenty of parking for your SUVs, too

For all of you who’ve been worrying about global warming while driving your Hummer to Butch’s Lobster Bar to dine on crustaceans flown in overnight from the coast, you can cease your fretting. Ken Pieper and Associates and Legendary Properties Sotheby’s International Realty (both of Evergreen) are now offering a high-end luxury home that not only features “a state-of-the-art media room, wine cellar, game room, exercise area and several family gathering areas,” but has a miniscule energy footprint. And it can be yours for the very reasonable price of … $4.5 million!

This showcase green mansion is located in the golf-course-side development Bear Dance, outside Larkspur, and it’s being touted as “one of the most environmentally friendly luxury homes ever built in Colorado.” I dunno, if it were me, and I were shelling out four-and-a-half mill, I’d want THE most environmentally friendly home ever built, but never mind.

The 9800-square-foot house, at 995 Longbow Place, has five bedrooms, six and one-half baths, and six refrigerators. That’s six (6) refrigerators, as in half a dozen. You can store a lot of Dom Perignon (flown in overnight from Paris) in six fridges.

But fear not: all that excess cooling capacity is powered by four roof-mounted solar panels. Additional solar panels pre-heat all the domestic water. “Unique, wrap-around wall insulation” eliminates drafts, while a Lutron HomeWorks low-voltage lighting system reduces wasted electricity when you’re watching “An Inconvenient Truth” on your built-in, high-def, big-screen TV. Three Unico High Velocity Airhandlers lose under 5 percent cooling capacity due to duct leakage, while the heating and cooling is 100 percent “hydronic” – i.e., it uses of water as the heat-transfer medium.

And all of the lumber for the hardwood floors was scavenged from a 19th-century Virginia barn, flown in overnight … oh never mind.