Sustainable Effort

This may be the moment that Peter Taggart has waited for. Committed to sustainable building practices since long before green became everyone's new favorite color, the Freeport, Maine, builder toiled for years in relative obscurity. Since founding Taggart Construction in the early 1990s, he has refined his building methods, serving the limited market for energy-efficient, resource-conserving, healthy custom homes. He has also contributed countless hours of pro-bono work to the green cause (a longtime board member of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, Taggart is slated to assume chairmanship of the U.S. Green Building Council's Maine chapter). At conferences and seminars he has freely shared what a less high-minded professional might consider trade secrets. “He really has created a niche for himself,” says architect Lynn Shaffer, who chose Taggart to build her own house. In southern Maine, she says, “Most architects consider him the go-to person for sustainable design. He's a leader; he's a person we turn to with our questions.” But being green has not always been a bankable commodity. “I think early in our history it actually worked against us in growing our company,” says Taggart. Now, with the sudden explosion of interest in all things green, Taggart finds himself in demand as never before.

The reasons are many, Taggart says. “One is the rise in allergies and asthma in kids; that's been growing for a while now, ever since the 1970s, when we started to tighten up our homes.” Higher energy prices also play a part, as do the emergence of global climate change as a consensus issue and frustrations with efforts to address the problem. Interest in greener homes represents the same impulse that has made Toyota's Prius hybrid a bestseller, Taggart says. “The Prius thing is about people wanting to make a statement, wanting to feel like they're making a difference. ‘Finally, I can vote with my pocketbook.'” Taggart says that his traditional clients see a house that functions in harmony with the environment and with lower energy inputs as part of a simpler life. In recent years, though, green building's appeal has spread also among clients who want to incorporate green features into luxury homes. He is currently working on a 9,000-square-foot, $3.5 million ocean-front compound in southern Maine that will include most of the green features that Taggart Construction has long incorporated into its smaller jobs. “We're doing more larger homes, because people now see what we're doing,” Taggart says. “Now that green and high-end are more combined, it's made it easier for us to move into that market.”

Photo: James R. Salomon As high-end clients awaken to the benefits of a green custom home, long-time green builder Peter Taggart is building more plum projects like this summer residence on Maine's Great Diamond Island. CLICK TO VIEW IMAGE GALLERY

In fact, it is the market that is moving to where Taggart has been all along. “In 1995, when I built my first house, we used a lot of the same techniques we're using now,” he says. Those include advanced framing methods, dense-pack cellulose insulation, exhaust-only ventilation, in-floor radiant heating fed by high-efficiency gas boilers, wood from local mills and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified sources, and low-VOC finishes. But Taggart's way of building cannot be reduced to a laundry list of materials and details. He helped Benjamin Obdyke test its HomeSlicker building wrap, which he considers a great product, but he doesn't always use it. Sometimes the application calls for HomeSlicker, he says, “Sometimes it's tar paper and vertical lath.” Building a durable, high-performance, low-maintenance, healthy house requires an intimate understanding of the building as a system, the environment in which it operates, the principles that underlie that operation, and the human interactions that influence it. It's not rocket science; it's building science.