The "Boussoleil" Home Integrates Solar, Geothermal, and Water
Last Updated: Feb 19, 2025"I am inspired by the delicious dialog that can arise between a home and its place," says architect François Lévy. He coaxed out such a dialog for clients Nancy Newell and Joerg Becker when he designed their sustainable, aging-in-place retirement home on a 16-acre rural site near Elgin, Texas.
Table of Contents
- Fully Integrated Systems
- How Did the Project Achieve Optimal Sun/Shade and Systems Balance?
- What Sustainable Details Did the Project Implement?
- Looking Forward, Looking Back
Fully Integrated Systems
After raising a large blended family in Austin, the couple wanted a sustainable home that would be super energy-efficient, low-maintenance, and adaptable to aging-in-place. They also wanted a design that would suit their modern sensibility, "while remaining sympathetic to the land and sensitive to nature," Lévy says.
The couple knew Lévy through a class Becker had taken with the architect on Vectorworks, a BIM (building information management) program for architecture, c, and stage/event design. Lévy is also the author of BIM in Small-Scale Sustainable Design.
"As we were deciding on our design, we started with our needs and wants," says Newell. "No steps, wheelchair access to the outdoors from the master suite, solar power. We want to retire here. A colleague of François's found a builder who fully integrates solar, rainwater, and geothermal in their house. We liked that idea. François included all of that our house."
Lévy believes that solar orientation, prevailing winds, vegetation (its scale and patterning), the site's topography, and the context of nearby natural and human-made features all inform a residential project. "Buildings that are responsive to their place," he says, "not only perform better, but are beautiful and satisfying—not because they parrot the mere form of natural structures, but because they are deeply absorbed in the laws of natural systems."
"The shark fin was one of François's ideas," Becker says. During summer months, "we open the windows on top and hot air escapes. It works well."
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What Sustainable Details Did the Project Implement?
Completed in June 2014, the wood-frame home has eight inches of spray foam insulation in the roof and six inches in the walls. The exposed concrete floors are slab-on grade. Standing-seam metal covers the roof and the walls. "When we were designing the house, there were lots of fires in the area, and ash was falling everywhere," Newell says. "We were looking at not only safety but also low-maintenance materials" when choosing the exterior cladding and roofing for the house.
The roof-top solar array includes 31 panels. "We're grid-tied," explains Becker, "which means when we produce power during the day that we don't need, we send it into the grid and at night pull it back in." The geothermal system includes four wells 150-feet-deep, "which go into a system and precool the incoming air from the outdoors," Becker says.
In addition to the "shark fin," a smoke hood over the electric stove pulls our heat. "A slot in the ceiling opens up to let out that excess heat," Becker says.
The couple collects nearly all of their rainwater from the roof, which is stored in a tank. An on-demand pump brings the water into the house, where it's cleaned, and UV filtered. "We use rainwater for all of our drinking water, showering, dishwashing, etc.," Newell says. "Every drought, we sweat. Usually, it's enough water for us, but it's not enough to also water the plants when it's dry. We put in a municipal pipe, so we don't lose our vegetable gardens."
Camille LeFevre
Camille LeFevre is an architecture and design writer based in the Twin Cities.