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"View Slideshow\n\nTalk about kinetic second acts\u2014in 2007 Allan Shope, a founding partner of the architectural firm Shope Reno Wharton who had spent decades designing houses for the likes of Keith Richards, Robert Kennedy Jr., Bill Murray and assorted billionaires, started a practice all his own, focusing on energy efficiency. \"I felt that I had spent my entire adult life building things for people for all the wrong reasons,\" he says. \"For their egos rather than their souls.\"\n\nHe sold his house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and moved full-time to the thousands of acres of untouched farmland that he had long owned in Amenia, in the heart of New York's historic Hudson Valley. And there he set out to design for himself and his wife a house that, for a wonder, would need neither energy nor maintenance. \"No one yet has designed a carbon-neutral building in America, but this is as close as anyone has come,\" he maintains of the finished product. \"The house is net energy positive\u2014it produces more energy than it uses.\" In other words, like all unselfish expressions of love, it gives more than it takes.\n\n\"No one has yet designed a carbon-neutral building in America, but this is as close as anyone has come,\" he maintains.\n\nShope laments that \"the American dream is still the two-story wooden Colonial house painted white, which rots and gives energy away foolishly. We live in a world of finite resources, and we urgently need to begin making houses in a way that reduces our consumption of those resources while,\" he takes care to add, \"still addressing aesthetic needs.\"\n\nOne of the interesting things he observed in his long years of residential designing is that \"people live in their kitchens and bedrooms\u2014the rest of the house is lonely.\" So now, for himself, he decided to just skip \"the rest of the house\" and build an equilateral triangle consisting of only a big kitchenlivingdining space and a bedroom, connected by a long hall\u2014the whole amounting to a mere 1,902 square feet but sufficient unto the use thereof.\n\nAs if he were building an economical, no-nonsense 18th-century barn, Shope dug a hole for the house in a southern-sloping hillside, thereby creating geothermal heat in the form of earth buffering on two sides and solar exposure on the third. In winter the almost-all-glass fa\u00E7ade allows the sun to penetrate deep into the house, where it is stored in the recycled-concrete floor and gives out heat during the night. \"That is a huge part of our heating system,\" he stresses.\n\nWhenever possible, Shope has always used whatever vernacular materials exist on a given site\u2014in fact, his motto is: \"If it isn't indigenous, don't use it.\" The fa\u00E7ade, roof and chimney, which all serve as solar collectors and dispensers, are sheathed in no-maintenance, everlasting copper recycled from the parapet flashing of a circa 1920s building on the farm (the blues and greens of the weathered copper panels evoke for Shope the waves in a Turner marine painting). And as for the interior, the walls and ceiling are crafted entirely from the wood of the black cherry trees that are abundant on the property.\n\nFor every house he ever designed, Shope has made a piece of furniture with his own two hands, using his late architect father's woodworking tools. For this house, so very much his own, he made all the furniture and cabinetry\u2014table, chairs, vanity, doors, built-in bed and desk\u2014out of the black cherry (the farm has its own sawmill and woodworking shop). And he even made the andirons for the copper-clad fireplace, not to mention the interior leaded-glass windows that not only filter light from the dining area into the hall but create an element of architectural layering that lures one to look into what lies beyond.\n\nThe prints on the bedroom walls are all from Audubon's original folio, and most of the birds on view, such as the passenger pigeon and the great auk, are long extinct. \"I put them there,\" Shope states solemnly, \"to remind me every morning of my environmental responsibilities to the world.\" Which, of course, is what this groundbreaking, if not earth-shattering, little house is all about."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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