In the Lap of Eco-Luxury

How Simon Baston dreams of housing the rich.

by Stephanie MacDonald

An opulent, state-of-the-art home is being built near Dundarave Beach with a swimming pool and a price tag nudging $5 million. “So what?” you yawn. True, it’s hardly a thrilling event; we’re in West Vancouver after all. But this is no McMansion—this is the house Simon Baston is building. And it’s poised to occupy a unique niche in the Canadian real estate milieu: the eco-friendly high-end home.

It’s difficult to envision what this wood and concrete skeleton in a muddy lot will soon flesh out to be: 6,000 square feet of sustainable splendour in a verdant, manicured oasis in the Lower Mainland’s priciest postal code. But Simon, owner of development company Leading Homes, can iterate exactly what sets this home apart from hundreds of other upscale dwellings in West Van.

“Homes here are being built to great standards, great detailing, fantastic specifications, but none of them comes with the unique selling point of a LEED Gold Standard,” exclaims Simon, a transplant from Wales who exhibits the boyish, rough-and-tumble enthusiasm you’d expect from someone who first fell in love with Canada during the rugby season he played in Edmonton for the Welsh Druids in 1990.

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is the measure of sustainability, health, and efficiency of a building. Certification levels range from Certified to Platinum and are based on a point system.

But the real question remains: in a world of exploding population growth and a civic movement toward greater density and less urban sprawl, isn’t there a fundamental conflict between living in a 6,000-square foot home and claiming to care about the environment?

Simon gives a disarming shrug. “Well, I could always use the argument that wealthy people are always going to want to live in big houses, so why not make them more sustainable?” says Simon, who wants to live in the house but at the same time is aggressively marketing it to potential buyers. “But the reality is, this is the way that virtually everyone in Europe builds, and that’s where I have all my building experience.”

Building is in the Baston blood. Simon’s father is a builder, and Simon himself entered the business as a bricklayer. After receiving a degree in building engineering, he went to work on strip malls. “No, no, no!” he says emphatically, when asked if he constructed the not-so-Earth-friendly structures. Instead, he refurbished them, turning the upper floors into apartments.

“It’s a different business in the U.K.,” he explains. “Here it’s knock it down and build something new. But in the U.K., this is what you’ve got—make it work. That’s why the European model is more inventive, due to the lack of land and the ability to knock something down. You have to use what’s there.”

Simon, his wife, Joanna, and their three kids left Wales for West Vancouver two and a half years ago. From the rugby tour that brought him from Edmonton to Vancouver 16 years earlier (“Being my student days, I don’t remember an awful lot of the tour,” he admits, laughing), Simon was already hooked on the West Coast lifestyle. Joanna took longer to convince.

“I think it was the combination of close family and historical ties [in Wales],” he recalls. “People go back 500 years in the village we live in. The reality of it now is I would go back before she would.”

Their move to Canada was seamless. Before emigrating, Simon had already bought apartments in Vancouver and on the North Shore and was renting them out. He made contacts with banks, realtors, solicitors, and accountants, building up his business model before he left Wales.

“When you’re an immigrant, nothing comes to you,” he explains. “You’ve got to work that much harder because you’re not from here.”

Despite the smooth transition, Simon concedes he misses certain things from the old country. “I miss my father. We worked together for 20 years and I had daily contact with him. It’s the pros and cons—you just have to weigh the benefits against the losses, don’t you.”

One of the key benefits of this part of the country, in Simon’s words: it’s a “sporting paradise.” He’s taken up rowing and skiing, and he plans to get into kayak racing next year. “My intention is that every year of my life I’m going to try a different sport. Because I like competition and I’ve always competed in different sports. This year I’ve taken up boxing, and I hope to have a fight.”

Simon freely admits he’s as competitive in business as he is in sports. He wants his company to be at the forefront of building high-performance, socially responsible homes. He’s confident it’s already there. “Without the shadow of a doubt. There are many builders who could claim to build high-performance homes, or high-standard homes, but are there any building a high-standard, high-performance home with the environmental certification that we’re going to give?”

From the outside, Simon’s house won’t look much different from your garden variety West Coast mansion. But its most entrancing features are the things you can’t see: natural building materials low in VOCs (volatile organic compounds); solar panels to heat the saltwater pool; drought-resistant landscaping; a greywater recovery system that preheats incoming domestic water; and underground cisterns that capture 100 per cent of rainwater from roofs, the driveway, and the patio for irrigation.

All this eco-innovation. Yet Simon wants more. “Really, we should be using rainwater to flush toilets, or use it for the swimming pool. Why would you use water straight from the tap? But codes have got to change here.”

Besides installing state-of-the-art eco-systems, the location was also vital to Simon. It’s important to him that the house be within walking distance of the village. “I think people in general are coming full circle, back to an appreciation of a more simple life, where you can walk to the market, grow your own food, where you know your neighbours.”

Despite his enthusiasm for green technology and livable communities, underneath the ebullience is a shrewd businessman who is cognizant of the economic potential of a business branding itself as sustainable.

“Let’s forget the sustainable lifestyle for a while and concentrate on the economics: a LEED Gold home will have 65 per cent energy savings over a standard new home. With energy costs rising on average of 8 per cent annually, this will be significant.”

You might think that low energy bills would not be high on the list for wealthy homeowners. But Simon knows better. “I’ve found that people genuinely want to know what can they do. I really do think they feel that certain levels of consumerism must be matched with their social responsibility.”

And with the global economic downturn, you might expect even the rich to take a firmer grip on their wallets and not splash out on a pricey home just now. Simon concedes that property values have indeed fallen. But he considers the kind of home he’s building to be worth the steep investment.

“You’ve got to ask yourself a question: the next property that you buy—you know, for multi-millions—do you want a home that’s future-proofed in value? Or are you going to build a home that’s just built to code standard, and two or three years down the line you’re going to have to pay 100 per cent of the energy costs, whereas this home is just 35 per cent? To me, they’re recession-proof.”

Meanwhile, a couple of streets away is another big, muddy lot earmarked by Leading Homes. Simon has plans to build a LEED Platinum-certified, single family house. One of its many innovations will be the installation of photovoltaic (solar) cells; whoever owns the home will actually be able to sell energy back to the grid.

Present project excepted, erecting grand palaces is not in the cards for Simon. Instead, his goal is to create inexpensive subdivisions or mass-produced homes designed to make the most of a smaller footprint. “To be honest, the direction I would like to go in the future is building better, not bigger.”

Stephanie MacDonald is a Vancouver writer who would never, ever consider moving into a sprawling, luxurious mansion. (OK, she would, but only if it were LEED certified.)