Elisabeth Post-Marner
Title: Principal, Spacesmith
Industry experience: 35 years
Elizabeth Post-Marner designs corporate interiors to help companies maximize their efficiency, but on the home front she’s finding ways to squeeze the most efficiencies out of energy consumption. The longtime Westchester County resident is using Passive House strategies to design a new home in Stamford for her own family. A registered architect since 1990 and a principal at Spacesmith in New York City since 2016, Post-Marner works with large employers on corporate interior projects.
Q: Is this your first home design job for your own use?
A: My husband and I are architects. We both did our graduate work at Harvard and met there, and we designed our first house in northern Westchester County. We designed that 20 years ago. It was a totally non-passive and the idea was to build the least expensive home possible: $100 a square foot, which even then was pretty low. We didn’t think about things like German windows. We had Andersen windows which leaked like hell. We lived there very happily for 20 years and we sold it last year.
We’d always been interested in a lot of things, but first and foremost being more environmentally-conscious. The idea of self-sufficiency has always been very appealing. I started looking at land and I found a beautiful parcel that’s surrounded by 250 acres of watershed, so it’s totally private. We wrote a program together, the idea being we’d like to make as small a house as possible. Part of our commitment to the environment is to not have excess square footage. We have 2,000 square feet and three bedrooms, because we will have my sister living with us. It’s all on one level. We have a contractor who does certified passive houses.
Q: What’s the difference between passive house design and net-zero projects?
A: The idea of a passive house versus net-zero energy is, in net zero, the energy has to come from your own source. In theory you could have a 10,000-square-foot net-zero energy house if you generate enough energy to offset the heating, cooling and electrical costs.
Passive house is different the purpose of which is to minimize the carbon footprint of your structure. Thus, size of house, number of stories and site orientation are part of the concept. Passive house criteria, which eventually became criteria for the Passiv Haus Institute (PHI), were designed by two persons, Bo Adamson, a physicist, and Wolfgang Feist, a professor of building and construction, in Darmstadt, Germany.
The extraction of heat and cool energy from exhaust air to mix with fresh air is one of the founding principles of passive house design. The other principle is insulation: provide enough of it to keep a house at a constant temperature throughout the year or, as my friend says, “a house you can heat with a hairdryer.” In our house design we have triple-glazed windows and about one foot of insulation to increase the R value (the higher the better) of the house envelope.
Other sustainable ideas that we are exploring include applying pine tar and linseed oil to the outside cladding of the house instead of paint. Very popular in Scandinavia, it weathers over time like a barn and it’s maintenance-free. We have virtually no windows on the north side of the house, and 10-foot-high operable windows on the south side. We’re researching several companies for the windows in Europe. Unfortunately, a triple-glazed window that meets the criteria in passive house design isn’t yet available in the United States
Q: What are some of the limitations of passive house design?
A: You cannot have a fireplace. You can’t have a gas oven, you can only have electric. And the fireplace thing was a little hard to get by, because we live in New England, we love fires, but we decided to give it up. And you can’t have an open flame. So we’ll have just an electric cooking range.
Q: What are your current projects at Spacesmith in the corporate interiors category?
A: As we speak I’m sitting at a construction site (at Hudson Yards) for MarketAxess, an 80,000-square-foot financial technology company headquarters, one of the most exciting projects we’ve designed this year. We’ve also done their London offices. In addition to our corporate work, we are privileged to do government and embassy work.
Q: Is there any pushback against the open office environment, especially now that some studies indicate that it hurts productivity?
A: Those studies are accurate if those people don’t have extended areas to work. This MarketAxess project is all open plan, but we have a lot of places that you can work during the day. Our research shows focused work, where you sit down alone at a table, is only a relatively small percentage of the day. It’s well under 50 percent at most companies. The rest of the day is collaborative, and it’s critical to have areas to get that teamwork done.
In a building where you don’t have those extensions of the focused workplace people aren’t going to be productive. Industry professionals originally thought by doing an open floor plan you could cut square footage dramatically and keep production and employee satisfaction high. A more accurate description of open plan and employee satisfaction is reapportioning square footage. What was once a private office is now a much smaller work station, but that space that was in the office for the two visitor chairs is a little meeting room.
We’re also seeing that there’s two other parts of a workday that haven’t been addressed as much as they should: learning and social activities. Those two are key to a happy workforce and a workforce that grows, because you have to provide ongoing learning. If you provide learning, people feel valued.
Also, social venues are very important. Natural light, places where you can relax are great if you can afford the real estate. We’re all working for more than we used to and spending more hours in the workplace than we probably should but if you can provide a place where people can go and interact, we find that works very well.
Post-Marner’s Five Favorite House Designs:
- Munstead Wood, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Surrey, U.K.
- Stoughton House, HH Richardson, Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Sert House, Jose Luis Sert, Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Farnsworth House, Mies van der Rohe, Plano, Illinois
- Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia, Thomas Jefferson
