Good design that lasts - even if it consumes more energy initially and costs a lot - is ultimately the greenest tactic, and designers around the world are beginning to realize that.

Zahid Sardar
San Francisco Chronicle

In San Francisco recently, the Luxury Marketing Council, a private networking organization, presented a panel on the topic of whether going green can incorporate luxury. The speakers included Mike Freed of Passport Resorts, who spearheaded the tony but earth-friendly Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur 16 years ago - long before it was considered chic or profitable to be green.

At Mike Freed's eco-resort in Big Sur, built in 1992, the tree houses and other structures are well built of materials that wear naturally. Ten new buildings along these lines have just opened.

Post Ranch's success in preserving the coastline, hillside forests and trails, and managing water use, waste and recycling created a demand and prompted it to add 10 new Cor-Ten-and-recycled wood buildings by Vladimir Frank. These new buildings - expensive and beautiful showcases of solar heating, gray-water management and recycled materials - mesh with the setting almost as well as the sturdy, quixotic, organic tree houses designed by architect Mickey Muennig when the inn first opened. They will be viable for a long time.

While not everyone can afford to stay in those buildings, many people can apply similar design ideas - Cor-Ten siding (a steel alloy meant to weather without the need for paint), atrium vestibules, outdoor showers with recycled water, solar thermal heating and recycled lumber - to their own homes. 

A model shows Tanner Leddy Maytum Stacy's 1991 proposal for Sutro Baths at Lands End in San Francisco. It would include a solar roof, wind turbines and a desalination plant.

In June, Freed and partner Tom Sargent, a principal of Equity Community Builders, will unveil their latest eco-resort: Cavallo Point, a collaboration with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the National Park Service at Fort Baker in Marin County, near the northern foot of the Golden Gate Bridge and just minutes from Sausalito.
This costly project (historic preservation as well as certification in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, known as LEED, are not cheap) includes Fort Baker's 17 dilapidated 19th century Army buildings, which were restored by Architectural Resources Group using archival photographs. Seventy-four new lodging units were built on the foundations of the Army's newer (midcentury) family housing. These plain and unobtrusive buildings of recycled wood, bamboo and stucco, by architect Marsha Maytum of Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects, incorporate solar or thermal heating, cross-ventilation for cooling and recycled denim in-wall insulation. They also leave an adjacent butterfly habitat unscathed.

Maytum is not new to the constraints of designing within historic structures and park settings. In a 1991 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art envisioning the future San Francisco, she and her partners proposed revitalizing the ruins of Sutro Baths near the Cliff House. Their proposal would have used wind power and tidal action to generate energy and also move ocean water through desalination tanks for bathing.

And in 1996, Maytum led the restoration of the historic Letterman Army Hospital building in the Presidio, using many of the energy-efficient ideas (including a photovoltaic entry awning) that are now LEED codified.

The former Letterman hospital.

"Historic preservation and sustainable design were never paired ... in that way" before the Letterman project, said Maytum, recalling the difficulty in finding manufacturers who understood their importance. The two are so well integrated now that manufacturers are willing to produce slightly costlier building products that last longer or are made of recyclable or recycled materials, she said.

In 1999, her firm adapted a 1950s Greyhound bus-repair station designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill as the San Francisco campus of the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) and put solar panels on the roof, making it the first important and largest solar-heating installation in the city at the time.