Portland developer ups the ante with condo project
When it opens later this year, Solaris will feature a rooftop solar farm, upgraded energy features and high-end finishes.
Plans call for a 23.7 kW rooftop solar array that is estimated to produce more than 26 megawatts of electricity per year — 50% of what the building is expected to consume. IMAGES COURTESY OF CORNERSTONE BUILDING & RESTORATION
By Scott Gibson
Buyers looking for a condo in one of Maine’s hottest real estate markets are accustomed to high-end finishes, great water views and amenities like outdoor decks. Tom Landry, a Portland real estate developer and builder, is hoping buyers can be persuaded to look a little deeper and appreciate the benefits of upgraded insulation, onsite renewable energy and triple-glazed windows from Germany.
Landry’s Benchmark Real Estate and CornerStone Restoration & Building are breaking ground this spring on just such a project. Solaris, a four-story condo project on Portland’s Munjoy Hill, will include performance features that are gradually becoming more common in high-end single-family custom homes, but have yet to see widespread use in the upscale condo market.
The property at 130 Morning Street is just a block from the Eastern Promenade, a popular and picturesque hillside overlooking Casco Bay on the city’s east end. Landry hopes to have construction wrapped up by Spring/Summer 2021.
Landry says Solaris represents a progressive move toward greater consciousness about the environmental and carbon impact of construction.
“It’s not going to be for everybody. It’s not a mass-market product. Will it be? I think so,” he said, suggesting that it’s only a matter of time until these approaches become the norm for condo projects.
FOUR FLOORS, EIGHT CONDOS
The Solaris building includes a ground-level garage, with a 350-square-foot, 1-bedroom studio apartment, and three upper floors with a total of eight condos. They range in size from 510 to 1,471 square feet. Landry is calling Solaris a building of “ecolux condos.” Buyers will get the finishes and features they would expect, he said, but also some performance characteristics that aren’t quite as obvious.
Features such as high-quality windows, increased insulation and careful air sealing should make the building more comfortable and less expensive to heat and cool than one that simply meets code. Features like those are slowly working their way into residential construction as buyers become more educated about the benefits of high-performance houses, but for now they are the exception rather than the rule.
Michael Chestnutt, senior architect with CornerStone, said Zip System R-sheathing would provide a layer of continuous insulation on the outside of the building that in conjunction with dense-pack cellulose in stud cavities would yield a total R-value of 29.4 in above- grade walls. Elsewhere, plans call for R-10 worth of subslab XPS insulation, R-13.6 of closed-cell spray foam on basement walls, and 9 inches of closed-cell spray foam in the roof with an R-value of 58.5. Other performance features include argon-filled, triple-glazed tilt-and-turn windows with a U-factor of 0.13, an energy-recovery ventilator and minisplit heat pumps for heating and cooling.
Plans also call for a rooftop solar array with a rated capacity of 23.7 kW. Developers estimate that this 70+ panel installation will produce more than 26 megawatts of electricity per year, 50% of what the building is expected to consume. Owners will split the $22,000 in one-time state and federal credits for the project based on the square footage of their units.
“Not only do the products create a well insulated, airtight envelope to reduce energy costs and provide conditioned fresh air for a healthy interior environment,” Chestnutt said, “but the layout of the floor plans take advantage of accessing sunlight to the key living and bedroom areas.”
COSTS ARE PROPORTIONATE
Prices in Portland’s hot housing market reflect high demand, especially in areas like Munjoy Hill. The high-end condos that Landry is bringing to market are priced accordingly. Costs at Solaris range from $695,000 for a one-bedroom unit to $1.49 million for a three-bedroom, 1,451-squarefoot unit on the fourth floor.
Prices are similar to another nearby condo development called Verdante at Lincoln Park, which will have 30 units when it opens later this year. Verdante developers also promise “forward-thinking construction,” triple-glazed windows, and the “best ways to insulate” but did not provide any specifics that would allow a comparison with Landry’s development.
While building super-efficient and high performing condominiums is fairly new to the condo market in Maine, a number of affordable housing projects around the state have already taken the high-performance route. These are not luxury buildings, so finishes and materials are far from high end. Construction costs, however, were much lower, and the buildings were constructed to Passive House standards, which should keep residents comfortable and operational and maintenance costs low. In Brewer, a 48-unit apartment complex was completed in 2016 under the auspices of Community Housing of Maine (CHOM) for about $140 a square foot. The 54,000-square-foot building has 48 units of housing. Another Passive House project, the 45-unit Bayside Anchor in Portland’s Bayside neighborhood, was built for about $142 a square foot (the general contractor on both projects was Wright-Ryan).
Those building costs would not be possible today given increases in labor and material costs over the last several years, says Erin Cooperrider, a principal in Verdante developer NewHeight Group and CHOM’s development director at the time the Brewer project was built.
“I believe affordable housing was leading the charge,” she said of enhanced building practices that have since moved more into the mainstream. In the case of high-performance affordable housing in Portland and Brewer, housing authorities owning the buildings continued to reap the benefits of low maintenance and energy costs.
Seven of the units feature covered decks, and living and bedroom areas are designed to maximize access to sunlight.
In the case of Solaris, the developer doesn’t get any long-term benefit — those advantages are passed along to the condo owners. And the fact that private developers are starting to see the advantages of offering better air sealing, more insulation, and better quality windows is encouraging to Naomi C.O. Beal, executive director of PassivhausMAINE and an advocate for buildings that make a lower environmental impact.
“For the most part, for market rate condos, that’s not typical,” Beal said of the energy features at Solaris. “In a scenario where you’re selling and not retaining the benefits of having those low energy costs that’s not been a trend that we’ve seen, so this is great.”
Landry said that high-performance condominiums probably will do better in an urban environment like Portland than they would in smaller, rural communities because of the city’s “convergence of awareness” about environmental issues. He’s in the preliminary planning stage of a similar project on inner Washington Avenue.
“For rent or for sale, we’re not sure yet,” he said. “If you think of the Tesla model, [Solaris] is the Roadster. Then we’ll come out with a much more mass-audience project. We want to have more people benefit.”
This article first appeared in the Spring & Summer 2020 issue of Green & Healthy Maine HOMES magazine. Subscribe today!