Let’s see, now. We have this house with concrete walls, concrete flooring, concrete tiles, concrete countertops, concrete fireplaces, concrete driveway, concrete tornado shelter.
Do we see a pattern emerging here?
The Portland Cement Association sure hopes so. The trade organization, which is based in Skokie, annually sponsors a showcase home for attendees of the International Builders Show trade exposition and convention, which runs here through Monday. Each year’s house is intended to promote the use of concrete products in residential construction.
But this one, dubbed the Safe Haven Show Home, goes out of its way to cast, if you will, a traditionally unglamorous building material in an elegant light.
Helped along toward that goal by co-sponsors Home magazine and EXPO Design Center, which have decked out the house royally for a flood of visitors, the house is a huge, traditional, family home with a huge price to match.
For about $3.6 million, the buyer of this house gets an acre of land in the swanky Buckhead neighborhood and the usual upscale wonders — some 12,000 square feet of finished space spread over three floors, with a home theater, indoor basketball court, craft room, wine cellar, nanny suite, five fireplaces and a seemingly endless supply of walk-in closets. In front of the house, there’s a big circular drive. In back, an in-ground pool.
But the bigger message here, the PCAhopes, is in its structural considerations and the promise, as the name implies, of a safe haven. For one thing, it’s going to be quiet in this house. Very quiet.
That’s because the framework of the house is constructed with insulating concrete forms (ICFs), in which concrete has been poured between two layers of polystyrene. The result is a concrete-walled structure that’s thoroughly insulated, both thermally and acoustically.
Plus, the house has a structural hollow-core floor system, essentially a concrete sub-floor that has fireproofing advantages and also deadens sound, according to architect Bill Harrison, whose Atlanta firm, Harrison Design Associates of Atlanta, created the house.
Harrison says that in tandem, the two concrete systems keep the noise of the world out and keep household noise from spreading to other rooms.
But there’s another “haven” issue here, too. One of the master suite’s two walk-in closets doubles as a “safe room” — with concrete walls, floor and ceiling to provide protection from tornadoes.
Public interest in safe rooms has been building for several years, according to Jim Niehoff, a spokesman for the PCA, who cites two sources: the devastating 1999 tornado in Oklahoma City, and a campaign by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to raise public awareness of the storm shelters’ effectiveness.
But hiding isn’t the primary purpose of this house, Harrison says. “It’s an entertaining house. It has a nice circular drive, with easy access in and out. It’s meant to be lived in, as opposed to a piece of artwork.”
The house has one rather formal room in front, a study/library that the architect likens to the parlor of old. “It’s the kind of room you go to when you want to have a serious chat with the boy who wants to date your daughter,” he explains.
But the overall emphasis is on relaxation, with one officially designated living room “where adults sit and hang out,” according to Harrison, and a “keeping room” in the back, a space measuring 28 by 20 feet that’s for the whole family.
This room, too, was designed with parties in mind, so that visitors could move easily from keeping room to kitchen to living room to covered porch, which has a fireplace and grill.
“Probably you’d call the keeping room a den or a family room in Chicago,” explains the architect, who has designed eight or nine houses in the Chicago area in recent years. (The home’s Atlanta builder, Stan Benecki, also has offices in Winnetka.)
Harrison speculates that the Safe Haven’s design could transfer easily to Chicago, particularly with the energy-conserving aspects of the ICF construction. In addition, its size might actually make it more at home on Chicago’s North Shore than in Atlanta’s Buckhead, he says. It would be considered medium-sized in well-to-do Atlanta neighborhoods, he says.
“The house that would be considered large here would have 20,000 square feet,” he explains. “A small house is 2,500 to 3,000. A starter is 1,500 to 2,000. So this house is relatively medium in size, for here.”
He pauses. “The largest house we did last year was 70,000 square feet.”
This, in turn, causes the listener to pause, and then confirm that, yes, he said seven-oh. Even the architect concedes that sometimes these things get a bit out of hand.
“What happens with a lot of big houses is that they become overwhelming,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine living in them. But I could imagine living in this house.”
Indeed, he says there are a few parallels between the Safe Haven and his own house. Both have very traditional styling and both are concrete.
“Atlanta used to be a big wood-frame area, and we still are,” Harrison says, adding that he’s seeing increased use of masonry in the area. “That’s because the price of wood has continued to go up, and the masonry has remained stable over the years, so more people are going to it.”
He estimates that concrete construction is 5 to 10 percent more expensive to build than traditional wood-frame construction, though that figure is narrowing. “It used to be 30 to 40 percent,” he says.
“A fair amount of that (5 to 10 percent) will be recouped in energy costs, in homeowners insurance, fire insurance.”
The National Association of Home Builders Research Center has suggested that the costs of building with ICFs tend to be inversely proportional to the amount of experience that a given builder has with the product. The group generalizes that builders tend to be more efficient in its installation after three or four houses.
As far as energy savings go, the same group has estimated that, in R-values (insulating effectiveness), ICFs range from R-18 to R-35, and that wood-frame homes range from R-12 to R-20.
For all its structural features, the Safe Haven Show Home comes in an arresting, glittering wrapper, which the PCA’s Niehoff says is necessary in order to make it a “show” home that would pull in the Builders Show crowd. “We don’t want to give people the impression that ICFs are strictly for the luxury home market,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of houses built (with ICFs) in much lower price ranges.”
But if “show” is what’s needed, it’s all here, significantly helped along in the impact department by the use of vivid colors on many walls, a noticeable departure from the typical mansionesque showhouse, which tends to look like a beige maze.
And then there are the elaborate ceilings here, which have been coffered, coved, beamed, vaulted, barreled and trayed, to name a few of the many variations.
“The roofs on the first floor average 11 feet, and they go up from there,” the architect says, adding that he’s seeing fewer two-story rooms than a decade ago, because home buyers are now inclined toward usable floor space, instead of air.
“You have to be careful with a two-story space, in order to make it feel like you’re living in a home, not a barn,” he says, adding that he’s particularly partial to ceilings.
“What you may notice the most in any house is the ceiling. It’s one of the most interesting parts of the house because you don’t cover it up.”
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The Safe Haven Show Home will be open to the public during the weekends of Feb. 16, Feb. 23 and March 2. For information, call 770-938-9900, extension 28; or check the Portland Cement Association’s Web site, www.concretehomes.com, which has information on the house and links to resources for concrete home building and products.
More coverage of the International Builders Show will appear on Sunday, Feb. 25, in The Tribune’s Real Estate section.
