A contractor and an architecture firm tied to Portland recently received national recognition for contributions to the Karuna House project in Newberg.

Hammer & Hand, which has offices in Portland and Seattle, and Portland-based Holst Architecture were on the Karuna House project team that earlier this month earned a Beyond Green Merit Award during Building Innovation 2015: the National Institute of Building Sciences annual conference and expo in Washington, D.C. The award, one of four given by the institute’s Sustainable Buildings Industry Council, recognized the home as a superior example of high-performance green building.

The $2.4 million Karuna House was completed in 2013, and has received several green building certifications, including Earth Advantage platinum, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum and Passive House. The Beyond Green awards jury praised the project team for providing valuable lessons to the industry by pursuing several green building certifications.

Portland-based Imagine Energy, a solar, heating and air conditioning company, was also recognized as a member of the Karuna House project team.

The Bullitt Center in Seattle received the top prize in the high-performance buildings competition. – Inka Bajandas

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Northwest high-performance builder Hammer & Hand is seeking entries from architecture students and interns for a sustainable design competition offering $6,000 in prizes.

The perFORM 2015 Building Design Competition is open to students attending accredited architecture schools and architectural interns working in the U.S. or Canada, Hammer and Hand spokeswoman Laura Pieroni said. Entries must be submitted by June 19, 2015.

The contest’s aim is to encourage designs that are both efficient and aesthetically pleasing, Pieroni said. Last year, entrants in the inaugural competition were tasked with designing a high-performance single-family home in Seattle. This year, contest organizers are seeking designs for a net-zero-energy, mixed-use multifamily building in Portland at a site near the intersection of East Burnside Street and Southeast 14th Avenue.

Competition entries will be judged by a jury of design and build professionals who will distribute $6,000 in cash awards to the winners. The winning designs will be posted online and in public displays in Portland and Seattle.

The date for officially announcing the competition winners is not set yet, Pieroni said.

More information and contest registration details are available at .

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Cameron Huber, a third-year undergraduate in the University of Oregon‘s School of Architecture and Allied Arts, recently won the $2,000 top prize in a national sustainable design competition.

The contest, “,” was sponsored by Northwest design-build firm Hammer & Hand. It challenged architecture students and young professionals to design a Seattle single-family house that is both highly energy efficient and aesthetically pleasing.

Huber’s design of a three-bedroom, 1,580-square-foot house impressed a jury of design professionals who noted its restraint, purity of form, friendliness to neighborhood context and understanding of energy performance within a holistic approach to sustainability.

The “HO[MIN]ID” house would be highly insulated, have solar panels, passive heating and cooling, and collect rainwater to use for flushing toilets and irrigating the yard. Huber added that he wanted to create a design that embraced the surrounding neighborhood with a front porch and large windows on the ground floor.

“Finding a form that really fit into this neighborhood tied into this holistic view of sustainability in the neighborhood,” he said.

Meeting tight requirements for energy use while creating an attractive building was a challenge, Huber said. He kept the home modest and economized the use of windows, which can reduce efficiency.

“The upstairs portion of it, I definitely had to cut a few windows (and other) things, but there was a minimum standard that we had to meet as far as energy use,” he said.

Huber said he’d like to pursue a career in sustainable design. He plans to use the prize money from the perFORM competition to design a line of sustainable portable bathrooms.

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Portland’s most en vogue ice cream shop opens its second location Friday on Northwest 23rd Avenue.

The renovation to the space that most recently housed a Mio Gelato is now complete, and you can see the work the project team did to give the space a historic feel.

The building was originally built in 1911 as the Esquire Nob Hill Theatre. The building has since been divided into two retail spaces, but you can still see remnants of the theatre; if you look up, you can see what once was the theatre’s balcony.

Salt & Straw owner Kim Malek said she wanted the shop to have a “mercantile” feel, sort of like an old general store where all the goods are displayed on shelves.  Contractor Hammer and Hand helped her achieve this vision with lots of reclaimed wood, high ceilings and garage doors.

Now, Salt & Straw is a pretty new business – it’s only been around since last summer – and Hammer and Hand isn’t exactly the cheapest contractor in town. But Malek said she was willing to go with the firm because she likes its work and wants customers to have a great experience with the shop’s atmosphere as well as with its ice cream.

And besides, with all the great press the shop is getting – and with summer right around the corner – it can probably afford whatever it wants.

Salt & Straw project team:

Architect: John Cooley, John Cooley Architect LLC, Portland
Construction: , Portland
Interior decorating: Sarah Littlefield, , Seattle

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Less than a year after building the first “mercantile feeling” ice cream shop in Northeast Portland, workers from are wrapping up construction on the store’s second location, opening Friday.

Kim and Tyler Malek debuted their small-batch ice cream flavors from a food cart in Northeast Portland last summer.

Hammer and Hand met a tight four-week construction timeline so that the Maleks’ new shop could open in the Acme Glass Building in time for the Alberta Street Fair on August 13. Salt and Straw became an instant Portland favorite and won significant national press, including kudos in O: The Oprah Magazine.

The second location on the corner of Northwest 23^rd Avenue and Kearney Street will have a similar motif as the flagship shop, although its construction did not require as much of a rush. Crews spent approximately eight weeks renovating the 1,400-square-foot space, which will offer an expanded café menu for the customers and a bigger kitchen for the ice-cream makers.

“We really like to focus on creating a sense of place,” Kim Malek said. “(The building) has a nice history, and we really tried to uncover that with the build-out.”

The shelves and café tables were built with reclaimed fir, and an old church pew was resized to add seating to the area.

“The old wood stock creates a lot of different shades and colors,” said Kevin Guinn, project manager for Hammer and Hand. “It’s really going to make another lovely store.”

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A 96-year-old building in Southeast Portland being renovated by is in the running to be the first commercial Passive House retrofit in the U.S.

When completed, the two-story building near the corner of Southeast Division Street and Cesar Chavez Boulevard will feature a restaurant on the ground floor. Hammer and Hand will move its rapidly expanding home performance division into office space on the top floor.

“Basically we are totally revamping the envelope of the building,” said Skylar Swinford, a consultant at Hammer and Hand. “We wanted to build it how we’ll actually be building in the future. Why build something now that will be obsolete in five or 10 years when the next code comes out?”

Passive House is a German building standard that uses advanced energy modeling and airtight construction techniques to dramatically reduce energy consumption.

For an added cost of $15 per square foot (when compared with more traditional construction), the second floor of the building will be retrofitted to meet Passive House standards, reduce energy use by 80 percent, and include triple-pane windows, extensive insulation, and a German heat recovery generator that will bring in a constant stream of fresh air and recover the heat generated by activities within the office space.

The water use, indoor air quality, and individual plug loads in the office space will be monitored by an advanced building dashboard. Comparing the actual data to the energy modeling will be important as the Passive House Institute U.S. works to tailor the German standard to American needs, according to Swinford.

The restaurant space on the first floor will not be constructed to meet Passive House standards, but will still be highly energy efficient, according to Swinford. The ventilation system above the stove ranges, for example, will ramp up or slow down depending on how much heat is being generated.

“Everything we put in that kitchen will be the highest efficiency available for that piece of equipment,” Swinford said.

The retrofit, designed by , is expected to be complete in the summer.

“It’s pretty fitting for the home performance energy team to be in such a high-performing building,” Swinford said. “We’re building something that will last another 100 years.”

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and designed a house that will serve as a case study for sustainable design certifications.

The 4,000-square-foot , to be built in rural Yamhill County, is designed to be certified by three building rating systems: , a Swiss low-energy-consumption system; , a German energy efficiency system: and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design at a platinum level.

“The client threw the doors open and said, ‘I’m going to make this an academic exercise,’” said Corey Hawbecker, designer at Holst. “He said, ‘Not only will I get this home that I’ve wanted for awhile, but it’ll benefit the field by comparing and contrasting different rating systems.”

The house was designed to have features that tailor to each system, though they often overlap.

To meet the goals of Minergie-P-ECO – the highest certification of Minergie – and Passive House, the envelope of the house had to be designed airtight. Both systems stem from the concept that structures can be heated passively through solar gains in the winter rather than mechanical equipment. To make sure Karuna House will be passively heated, each of its windows was individually designed to optimize natural light and heat. The windows facing the south, for example, are much more transparent than windows facing the north.

However, Menergie-P-ECO and Passive House differ in that Passive House is based purely on energy criteria and, therefore, does not take into account building materials. Both Menergie-P-ECO and LEED at the platinum level require that certain materials be used for finishes, floors, glue and paint. Consequently, the house will use primarily renewable materials, such as wood.

The Menergie-P-ECO criteria also takes into account the noise level of a house – a condition not included in LEED ratings. The Karuna House will contain sound attenuators in its ventilation system and acoustic dampening material in its walls and floors to prevent transfer of noise from one room to another.

“Building this way is good for you from a long-term health perspective because your house is comfortable – not only temperature wise, but it’s quite and there are not a bunch of allergens in the house,” Hawbecker said.

Hawbecker said the LEED platinum rating will be the toughest of the three designations to obtain because the house’s rural location will not be near public transportation, which is part of the system’s criteria. He hopes the other sustainable design aspects of the house will make up for its rural location.

“It’s all sort of a point-based system, so you choose your priorities,” Hawbecker said. “You could use a stone floor everywhere, but you wouldn’t get a point, so you would have to make it up somewhere else.”

The house is currently in its early construction phases. When completed, it is expected to be the first Menergie-certified house in North America, Hawbecker said.

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The second phase of a 12-home project in North Portland is nearing completion, and the new homes feature several green building initiatives that are new to the nonprofit’s construction efforts.

Instead rough stairs covered with carpet, the six new homes built in the second phase feature all hard surface stairs in order to cut energy consumption and to improve indoor air quality.

Crews from last week wrapped up several weeks of work on the homes. Professionals helped finish the work done by volunteer laborers who framed the staircases in the homes at the Rivergate Commons on North Lombard Street. As part of the sweat equity required by Habitat for Humanity, each family contributes 500 hours of work toward the completion of their future homes.

“The unexpected outcome of this partnership has been the alignment that we’ve discovered in green building,” said Zack Semke, spokesman for Hammer and Hand. “We’re looking forward to expanding upon in our relationship with Habitat in the future.”

The homes are expected to be completed in March.

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A growing number of older Americans are modifying their homes instead of moving into retirement communities or assisted-living quarters, according to the National Aging in Place Council. And some local builders are looking to accommodate that mounting building niche.

Portland-based recently hired an aging in place specialist, Stacey Foisy, as part of the launch of its new Universal Design Services, which features home safety assessments and aging-in-place retrofits. Its launch coincides with National Aging in Place week, which begins today.

“As baby boomers are getting older, the demographic shift is leading to a natural uptick in interest in this sort of thing,” said Zack Semke, director of business development at Hammer and Hand. “Barrier-free retrofits make it possible to live in houses and be independent, safe, and happy and really have a different experience than if you’re forced to sell your house.”

Examples of universal design retrofit measures include step-less entries, wider doors, lowered surfaces and open floor plans.

“Aging-in-place may conjure images of institutional style changes to a house, but that’s not necessarily the case,” Semke said. “The modifications are consistent with our ethos around fine design too.”

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The odds were against her, but Kim Malek wanted to open her new ice cream shop in time to catch some of the summer rush.

Malek believed the growing arts district on Northeast Alberta Street would be the perfect home base for , which offers unique, locally sourced ice cream. But a remodel of the Acme Glass Building on Northeast Alberta at 21st Avenue would not be done until the end of summer.

So while one general contractor handled the overall remodel of the building, Malek hired her own crew to finish her space quicker. But that solution stacked a whole new set of odds against Malek and her project team.

“The project was fraught with inherent challenges,” project manager Kevin Guinn said.

Crews working for the developer, 21 Alberta LLC, were still gutting and remodeling the rest of the Acme Glass Building, and Malek sought a four-week turnaround from Hammer and Hand.

The Salt and Straw shop accounts for only about one-fourth of the ground-floor retail space. Normally, the major renovation would be finished first, and then individual tenants could add finishes. But because of the timing involved, the Hammer and Hand team worked in an unsecured Salt and Straw space for most of the project.

During construction, Malek was down the street selling her ice cream out of a custom-built cart. Nate Celko, the developer behind the Acme Glass Building, let the Salt and Straw cart park on the patio of another of his properties – the Alberta Central complex between 17th and 18th avenues. Although Malek said the interim cart setup was a “blessing in disguise,” her eye was still on the Acme Glass Building.

“It’s easy to imagine two teams of construction folks in there, pointing fingers about who’s there at what time, and on top of that I was insisting on this unreasonable timeline,” Malek said.

But lead carpenter Stephanie Lynch worked closely with the 21 Alberta LLC crew and Celko to coordinate work schedules. Hammer and Hand ended up building the demising wall to prepare for finishes.

“Communication with the developer was important every single day,” Lynch said. “We both had our agendas and we just had to do our best to take care of each other and make it all flow smoothly.”

The finishes that Hammer and Hand rushed to install were not run-of-the-mill. Malek wanted Salt and Straw to feel “as if it had been there forever,” so the shop includes wood from the bleachers of Lewis and Clark College’s original athletic stadium, salvaged Multnomah County Library shelving, and materials from a 100-year-old barn and a deconstructed high school.

Salt and Straw’s early debut in the Acme Glass Building, on Aug. 12, paid off.

“(August) 13th is still our record day – the line was all the way down the street,” Malek said. “It was the best marketing anyone could ask for. I owe a lot to everyone.”

The overall building renovation is nearly completed and will result in the availability of about 5,000 square feet of retail and creative office space. Another mixed-use project is planned for the adjacent property, and retailers have already expressed interest in leases even though construction will not begin until November, according to broker Kathleen Healy.

“It’s really unusual to get offers at this point in the process,” she said.

Healy is managing the retail space on the ground floors of both the Acme Glass Building and the adjacent 20:20 property, which is expected to be completed in summer 2012. Interest is continuing to grow for spaces in both buildings, she said.

Benco is negotiating a lease with a widely known Portland chef who wants to open a restaurant in the space next to Salt and Straw. Healy declined to identify the chef, because a deal hasn’t been finalized. Also, a business that sells medical-related items may reserve retail space in the 20:20 before ground is even broken for the building.

“I’m over the moon,” Malek said. “My business depends on foot traffic and a thriving community. I’ve heard hints about pretty amazing tenants negotiating leases, and this could really become a destination for Portlanders to come out for the night.”

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