Rufty Homes

A Healthy House at a Healthy Price
The News & Observer
October 12, 1994

The News & Observer

October 12, 1994

A healthy house at a healthy price

CARY -- Step inside and feel the lush carpeting made of recycled Coke bottles, or walk outside on the large deck made of recycled plastic and wood. And be sure to check the attic, where the insulation is composed of shredded newspapers.

This is a house of second chances. Jon Rufty, president of Rufty Custom Built Homes, has brought an eight- bathroom, five-

bedroom, one-of-a-kind "HealthyHouse" to the Triangle.

It's a health-conscious, environmentally sensitive, water- and energy- conserving, resource-using recycled house. And it's going to cost someone between $680,000 and $700,000 to call it home. "It's true that this is a top-end-of-the-market house," Rufty said. "The person who buys this will come from either the Northeast or the West Coast. Because they're the ones who come from similarly priced markets and they are the ones that have accrued the equity in similarly priced houses."

Originally Rufty had tried to build a house that was both environmentally and health-sensitive, but found that sometimes the two were in conflict. Specifically, there are a lot of products that are available both in steel and wood. Wood is better environmentally, Rufty said, because it's easier to process than steel: Mining and processing steel degrades the environment. But, he said, "wood often involves glue and paint that can produce gases harmful to the occupants' health, so it's not that easy to find the clear and safe path." Rufty said he does not expect a crop of healthy homes popping up throughout the Triangle, but he does expect a slow, steady increase in consumer demand for environmentally safe and economical products and appliances throughout the Southeast.

The house in MacGregor West is the first of its kind in the Southeast, according to Rufty, and there are only a very few in the whole United States. "But his is real and it's the present. We can sell these because people are becoming increasingly health conscious," said Debbie Houston, director of the new homes division of Howard Perry & Walston Realtors/Better Homes and Gardens. "Folks are demanding environmentally safe products and it only makes sense that Jon should have built these houses."

The idea, according to Rufty, is not to build subdivisions with lot after lot of healthy homes. Instead, he wants to sell environmentally friendly "green packages" that can be installed in any existing home for $5,000 to $10,000. Imagine, for example, metal insulated garage doors that are belt-driven to reduce noise and vibration to the room above; and a driveway made of a kind of concrete that allows water to penetrate, controlling runoff and erosion.

"Obviously, energy efficiency is important to people, at least so far as it relates to the purse," Rufty said. "And indoor air quality is important to people, at least so far as it relates to health. "So we don't want to build complexes of these homes. We want to offer packages so people have options." Most of the houses in this West Cary development off U.S. 64 are about $450,000, Rufty said. "This one house is over the mean because it offers more in terms of space {6,450 square feet} and we've used top-of-the- line environmental features." Other homes in the development are not as environmentally friendly and don't have the same features.

All in all, the total price for all of the environmental and health products that this house is equipped with would be about $25,000, according to Rufty. Eleanor Blackwell, regional director of the American Lung Association in North Carolina, said, "This project makes sense. It makes sense because the home is where so many people spend so much of their time, and the home should be a healthy place to be." Despite the high costs of the new homes, Rufty said, the features offered in this model home "are by no means exclusive to the high-end market."

"This was a project that we naively started one year ago. We were just wanting to build a house that we thought might be kind of neat, that our customers would be into and we thought we might be able to get some good publicity," said Rufty.

Rufty is confident that this house will sell. He said several people have looked at the home and he thinks that it will be sold by the end of the year.

STAFF PHOTO BY MEL NATHANSON