Feeling is believing. For a just-completed, 5,500-square-foot home at 100 Coleytown Road, built to exacting standards for healthy, nontoxic surroundings and energy efficiency, a walk-through reveals how designer/builder Doug McDonald’s Pure House is made.
Interviewed on-site, with carpenters, painters and other tradesmen at work on its finishing details, McDonald points out key features. In subfreezing weather, the home’s interior is a near-perfect room temperature. The toxin-free paint that’s being applied as he gives the tour has no odor; for a construction site, the rooms are amazingly pristine. Much of the comfort level is due to the home’s high-performance features. These include super-insulated walls with a separate interior cavity for pipes, wires and vents to maintain the insulation’s integrity. Like the walls, windows and doors are also airtight. The space “breathes” via an air exchanger that works 24/7, constantly refreshing interior spaces with clean air from outside. It’s a beautiful system, one that McDonald worked to perfect in his own Westport home, a renovation of a cube-shaped, modern structure. This new Pure House has a more traditional, New England aesthetic—but its innards are all strictly twenty-first century. Stop by on April 22—Earth Day—to get a tour, and feel it for yourself. thepurehouse.com