Ocean Avenue Mansion Goes Green

Eating healthy, living healthy and building healthy are all common sense, says construction manager Hamilton Hoge, who is leading a green renovation of 13 Ocean Avenue in Quogue—a brick, American-Tudor-style mansion that, before Mr. Hoge first came across the property a year ago, was a mere pile of rubble, he recalled.

“It was almost demolition by neglect,” said Mr. Hoge, president of Southampton-based Hamilton Hoge Construction Management, while standing outside the circa-1928 home last week. “But it was caught in time by the buyer, who had enough vision to say, ‘I like the bones. I like the shape. But Ham, I want to make some changes.’”

What ensued was a structural overhaul from the ground up that is expected to be completed next year, Mr. Hoge said. Equipped with solar energy and geothermal heating sys-

tems, the self-sufficient home will be nearly off the grid, with the exception of its security and video systems, he said.

“I think everything has to be built as a smart house and a green house from here on out,” Mr. Hoge said. “Anybody who’s not is well behind the times.”

Over the last six years, Mr. Hoge said he has noticed a trend that strays away from building copy-cat, cookie-cutter, sheetrock castles. Instead, some homeowners are opting to work with what they’ve already got. And with that has come an increased demand for building green.

Though building to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards comes with a higher price tag than building conventionally, there are many ways to achieve a more eco-friendly home, according to Mr. Hoge, including cutting back on new construction material and installing smart control, solar energy and geothermal heating systems, all of which are utilized in this project.

In the late 18th century, the Ocean Avenue property was owned by Henry Gardiner, a descendant of Lion Gardiner, who founded the first English settlement on the East End in 1635. By the early 1900s, the land had changed hands to James Kellogg Burnham, who built a house on the northern half of the property. In 1928, his heirs built another house, on the southern half of the property, now known as 13 Ocean Avenue.

The house has changed hands since then, but its most recent owner, a Wall Street executive with a young family (who asked not to be named), bought the house from the Lustgarten family in 2009, Mr. Hoge reported.

“History is the new work because, basically, there’s value in older houses,” Mr. Hoge explained. “People love the fenestration, they love the flow, the light, the land. What we wanted to do on this house was not just restore it, but restore it to very high LEED certification. That was a challenge to engineer from the beginning.”

With replacement materials and rehab, about 75 percent of the house was retained in its original form, Mr. Hoge said. That process began with bricks.

“All of it was taken down and all of it put back in, with the exception of that one spot,” Mr. Hoge said, pointing to the front left corner of the house, where a chimney shot up from the roof. “You’ll see the mortar bleed for another six to eight months, and then we’ll treat it so it matches up exactly.”

An addition to the home—which houses a living room, bedroom and master suite—will also match up, thanks to 40,000 bricks shipped to the East End from Illinois by truck and rail that were fired by a kiln dating back to when the house was built. Mixed in with some old bricks, the “new” ones make three window arches on the back of the house, an area that would have traditionally been a screened-in porch, Mr. Hoge said.

But the most difficult part was stabilizing the one remaining original corner, which was on the verge of collapse, he said. The team drilled through every third brick, and installed an expandable lead molly bolt (a hollow wall anchor), which pulled the bricks back into a retaining wall built on the other side of the bricks, he said.

“By making this a green building, we’ve minimized the new materials by salvaging the old,” he said.

This same ideology also applied to the roof.

“It was pretty excessive, meaning that we actually took the original roof off and stacked it up in all these boxes,” Mr. Hoge recalled. “And then we found the original Ludowici mold and we had the tiles copied, the same ones they used to manufacture in the 1920s.”

He looked up at the roof, squinting away from the sun.

“And so we mixed in some new ones with the old, but you can’t really tell the difference,” he continued. “You’d have to pull them out.”

In keeping with the original architecture, the flooring will be vertically-grained dark fir. And the fireplaces will be lined with roof tiles instead of firebrick.

Breaking away from the old are the now high-efficient, leaded glass windows and soy-based insulation, Mr. Hoge explained. Smart systems will control lighting and heating, he said.

“It’s a really good, forward step, especially for out here,” said design and project consultant Taylor Hoge—Mr. Hoge’s son. “You drive around and the houses here are gigantic. This area really needs this kind of technology.”

The solar panels on the roof power the house’s closed loop, geothermal heating system, the senior Mr. Hoge said.

“Of course we’ll have the emergency backups, if needed, but it’s basically a self-sustaining house,” he added. “With the geothermal, we have almost three quarters of a mile of loops going in the ground. We had to be very careful with the old trees here, in order to stay away from their roots, to stay away from dry wells. It was a pain in the ass, but it’s worth it in the long run.”

Many of the property’s trees were planted by Baier Lustgarten, founder of Lustgarten Nurseries and a former owner of the property. Three years after Mr. Lustgarten’s death in 1990, his widow, Elizabeth Lustgarten, hired landscape architect Edmund Hollander to refurbish the grounds as a tribute to her late husband.

Now, Mr. Hollander is back for round two.

“You realize how long you’ve been in this business when you start to renovate a property for the second time,” Mr. Hollander said during a telephone interview last week. “It talks to the value of design, in that you can take one property that works for one family from one time and make it work for another family in another time.”

Since the plants and trees have matured, the key is preserving the best of what is there, Mr. Hollander said. Mr. Lustgarten planted interesting collections, he pointed out. There are blue and golden Atlas cedars, a great old beech tree, yellowwoods and specimens of stewartia. But it wouldn’t be complete without the weeping kousa dogwoods, or “

cornus kousa

,” that Mr. Lustgarten developed and named “Elizabeth Lustgarten,” in honor of his wife.

There is quite a bit a work to be done on the property. Mr. Hoge estimated that the house will be completed sometime before the end of next year. The gardens are an ongoing production, Mr. Hollander said.

“What it is right now is a mess,” Mr. Hollander said of the 3-acre grounds. “What it will be when it’s done is something that maintains the historic flavor of the property. It’s a country property, and the property is in the context of the village. Quogue is pretty unique out here. These are properties that have age, great trees and great character.”