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B Y T A N Y A I S H I K A W A

P H O T O S B Y K R I S T O F E R N O E L

A self-sustaining retreat and recording space, tucked away on an alpine mesaStudio

in the Clouds

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S miling guests flow in and out of Alan Bradbury’s mu-sical mountain getaway. The guitarist and composer shares a laid-back, Hawaii-style vibe with musicians, friends and family who

make the ascent to his 13,000-square-foot, ultra-customized home outside of Telluride. Yet even though Bradbury enjoys high-end entertaining and lavish amenities, he is serious about his efforts to minimize any damage to the natural environment caused by the good times he shares with his companions.

So sincere is Bradbury’s commitment to sustainable living that he worked for more than seven years alongside a dedicated team of contractors to build a house that includes more than 90 solar panels, a 13,000-gallon tank of “near steam temperature water”, two miles of in-floor heating tubing, and a 1,200-square-foot attached solarium

(which doubles as a greenhouse). The result is a luxurious home that actu-ally gives back more energy to the San Miguel Power Association than it uses.

“I would never have had it in me to be in a house this size that wasn’t some-what ‘eco’,” Bradbury explains. “My philosophy has always been that if you have enough money to build big — and I believe anything 5,000 square feet or so should be considered a large house — you’ve got enough money to be environ-mentally conscious.”

Bradbury has lived on Hastings Mesa above Telluride for 40 years. He and the members of his house band, “Skyblue,” have played alongside some of the most prominent musicians in the recording industry, from Carole King, Dave Mat-thews and Dan Fogelberg to Dizzy Gil-lespie. But Bradbury is much more than a musician. He’s also a land developer, planner, and occasional construction worker who helped plan and build Town

Park. He spent thousands of daylight hours working alongside his own con-struction crew to help create his home, and many evenings after they left, he kept on working. First and foremost, the aim was always efficiency.

“Our goal was to use zero net energy, by either producing energy on-site, or by minimizing energy loss through efficient insulation,” says the home’s designer and builder, Gary Gross, Bradbury’s good friend and the owner of Construction Services of Telluride. “We also hoped to gain passive energy, through the solar windows in the greenhouse.”

“We wanted to make it big enough for Alan to have a music studio and have a bunch of people stay there when they’re recording,” he adds. “We took it from there, and the project just evolved.”

Gross admits this is “by far” the largest house he has ever built — well beyond the 2,000 to 4000-square-foot homes he typically constructs. That posed special

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challenges. “Obviously, it’s easier to build an efficient house that is smaller,” he says. “But we figured, as long as we were compensating for the energy usage, Alan could have the space he wanted.”

Bradbury purchased his property on the mesa in 1978, after establishing a na-tional reputation as an electric guitarist. Inspired and mentored by English guitar-ist and songwriter John Renbourn of the folk group Pentangle, he transitioned to acoustic guitar and moved to Colorado to perform on the ski resort circuit each winter. During the summers, he earned a livelihood as a landscape designer and certified arborist, developing parks and botanical gardens in Colorado and Hawaii.

The original Hastings Mesa property was 2,000 acres, and the sellers wouldn’t subdivide. So Bradbury gathered a group of friends, mostly musicians, to purchase it. They divvied it up into a variety of par-cels, ranging from 40 to 500 acres in size. Bradbury lived on two different parcels near his current homesite before finish-ing the construction.

There were few elk on the property due to overhunting. Instead, the parcel was populated mostly by cows. The new landowners fenced the bovines out, es-tablished non-hunting covenants, and put sheep on the land, instead. (Brad-bury says thousands of elk overrun the mesa today, even though hunting was reintroduced years ago.) The 90-acre property has access to 2.5 miles of trails that traverse forested mountainsides, a canyon and pastureland. There are views for miles, a pond with trout, and a stream with beaver dams.

Though Bradbury splits his time be-tween Colorado and Maui, Hawaii, where his property includes an arboretum and botanical garden he develops and over-sees, he considers Hastings Mesa his real home. “This is where my friends are. I love the high country,” he says. “I’ve always figured life begins at 7,000 feet.”

REUSING FOUND PARTS

The construction of his Colorado home began in the summer of 2006 with digging and setting the foundation. The next two summers were spent framing. Bradbury used three area timber framers: Bob Newman, Mike Swanson and Glen Pihl. Right from the start he strove to keep not only the home’s environmental foot-print small, but also those of his builders. “I tried to keep all our labor from within 10 miles of our site,” he says. He didn’t have to skimp on quality in order to do it. “The builders around here are real crafts-

people,” he says. “The engineering that went into this place was amazing.”

As the house began to take shape, there were some fortuitous finds. Brad-bury and Gross heard about “a bunch of copper clad windows” that were avail-able for salvage from “a 15,000-square-foot masterpiece” home on Wilson Mesa. The house had been sold by an owner who was prohibited by the county from building a helipad, and the new owners wanted to remove the home because it was in an elk calving area. “It was way too beautiful to demolish,” Bradbury re-called. “The stonemason cried when he heard they tore it down.”

Though the windows had already been taken by the time he and Gross arrived, they found a treasure trove of high-end housing materials. They purchased salvage rights for about $1,000 and transported a crane up to the house. They had two days to cull as much as they could, including beams, timbers, spiral staircases, doors,

View from the guest room towards the office tower. Roofing material is multicolored EcoStar plastic slates (when asked to pick a color from samples, Bradbury said, “Let’s use them all”).

The construction crew sets the salvaged pyramid skylight on top of the octagonal, tower guest room. Photo courtesy of Gary Gross

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railings, a pyramid skylight, acoustic wall-coverings from a home theater, electrical parts, and boilers — an estimated $40,000 or more worth of materials.

“We kind of designed the house around what we had,” Bradbury says. The Habitat for Humanity store in Montrose was the source for the remaining doors on the home (except one), as well as 80 percent of its windows, cabinets, and other ma-terials. Says Bradbury, “Hardly any two doors in this house match.”

Both Gross and Bradbury, as well as his many guests, agree that the pyramid sky-light they scavenged ended up in one of the best spaces in the house: an octagonal tower room at the top of a spiral staircase, wrapped in a narrow, outdoor balcony. At the highest point in the three-level home, the guest room is a perfect hideaway for visitors, who enjoy a panoramic view that stretches from horizon to horizon.

Additional repurposed and scrap mate-rials in the house range from stairs made

of South American mahogany (trans-formed from packing crates used to ship Caterpillar tractor parts) to beams and exterior wall coverings (made of recycled steel from Recla Metals in Montrose). The granite countertops are leftovers from Mountain Village projects, and rem-nant wool carpet covers some floors. Bradbury furnished most of the home with used pieces he purchased from Heirlooms for Hospice, in Montrose.

RECYCLED AND ENGINEERED MATERIALS

An enormous amount of care was taken in the selection of every element in the house to avoid waste and ensure an efficient use of resources, right right down to management of the construc-tion site. “We always try to recycle the scraps on a job site,” Gross said. On Hastings Mesa, “We used a three-yard dumpster, the same size as you find in

alleys. It was the only one we had for the whole job. We’d fill it up once a month or less, which really minimized the amount of trash going to the landfill. A normal job like that would have required two 20-yard dumpsters at all times.”

The building project’s biggest “carbon footprint” came from transporting re-cycled and energy efficient products to the homesite. A lot of materials “aren’t made in Colorado, which is a shame be-cause we have the timber industry here. Everything could happen here. We have the basis for manufacturing, but none of it is happening,” Bradbury says. Much of what was needed “was made either in Canada or on the East Coast. And that meant everything had to be shipped cross country.”

The home’s flooring is linoleum made from 60 percent recycled material and is moveable and reusable. The shingles on the roof are not only moveable and reus-able; they are also 97 percent recycled from car tires, radiator hoses and various post-consumer waste. The shingles carry a 50-year warranty, and are fireproof and fade-resistant. They look like slate, but are dense enough to help reduce noise (a handy feature in a home where recording music happens frequently).

As for the home’s foundation, the footer forms are made from a product called Form-A-Drain®, comprised of 12-foot long sections of recycled plastic hol-low panels; the panels provide interior and exterior drainage, and vent radon from beneath the basement slab and the foundation’s perimeter. The remain-der of the foundation is composed of

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A balcony off the master bedroom provides access to the warmth, humidity and greenery of the solarium.

The crew installs the structural insulated panels (SIPs). Photo courtesy of Gary Gross

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interlocking recycled polystyrene foam blocks, with concrete poured inside. The foam’s insulation capacity, combined with the thermal mass of the concrete, makes the foundation two times more energy efficient than typical framed walls. Its light weight also makes it inex-pensive to ship (and easy to assemble).

The walls are insulated with struc-tural insulated panels, or SIPS, that contain six-inch polyurethane cores. According to Bradbury, the walls have a value of R40, meaning they offer an extremely high level of insulation based on thermal resistance.

MAXIMIZING SOLAR ENERGY

The result is a house so efficient that “all winter long, we open windows,” Bradbury says. “Otherwise it’s too hot and uncomfortable. The greenhouse is the key to everything. Almost any house in the southwest should have a solarium greenhouse.”

Growing up in Michigan, both of Brad-bury’s parents were gardeners, and his entire backyard was a garden. At his home on Hastings Mesa, he personally tends the plants in his 1,200-foot, south-facing greenhouse. Not only are Stevia, mint, tomatoes, chard, kale and all the other in-gredients that go into Bradbury’s favorite “green smoothie” grown there, but hu-midity and warm air from the greenhouse spread through vents to the rest of the house. Temperature-controlled blowers keep the home mostly above 50 degrees, and up to 60 degrees, even in deepest winter on the alpine mesa.

Passive solar energy, which is gained through the windows, also helps to keep the place toasty. So do 30 passive solar panels on the home’s roof, and another 60 panels — plus 46 hot water collectors — tucked discreetly away on a mountainside south of the house. (Bradbury had left an area open in case more solar energy capacity was neces-sary, but he found just half the panels meet his energy needs.)

The solar panels heat 13,000 gallons of hot water, stored under the greenhouse. This heat source pre-warms not only the home’s drinking and bathing water, but is distributed through 10,000 feet of tub-ing to heat the floors of the house.

Though boilers were installed, they are typically used no more than once a winter. “Nobody really did what was done here before, so no one understood the capability,” Bradbury observes. “I’ve never heard of another house this size with the same solar capacity.”

Overall, “We’re producing twice the energy of what we consume,” he adds. “There are times when we’re recording music when we use that excess, but usu-ally most of it goes into the grid.” Build-ing this home “really proved to me that people should be providing their own energy sources in this part of the world, where solar is so efficient. The interest-ing thing is, I got a bid for solar before we

Hillside solar panels, combined with panels on the roof, combined generate twice as much energy, on average, as the 13,000 square foot home needs.

Looking from the living room into the greenhouse solarium. The home’s doors are an eclectic mix of non-matching designs and sizes.

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named his house that, too). It’s an ideal retreat for the guitarist and his friends — up to 10 guests at times — to gather and create music.

Because the house is so efficient, “People can leave the lights on when they leave the studio and not feel guilty,” he jokes. But when he’s the last to exit, the owner of this highly efficient, warm and comfortable home on Hastings Mesa turns the lights out, anyway. “We do the best we can,” he concludes. “It’s not like we can be flawless. But certainly, we can try to minimize our impact on the earth.”

started the construction, and by the time we were finishing this home, the cost had dropped by 50 percent. So solar energy is becoming extremely affordable.”

A BIT OF LUXURY, AND FINISHING TOUCHES

While money was saved on the pur-chase of the home’s repurposed ma-terials and furnishings, Bradbury did integrate a few luxuries into its design, such as exposed timbers. Even these are “green:” they consist of both engi-neered lumber, made from fast grow-ing, renewable resources, scrap wood bonded by non-toxic glues, and sustain-able wood approved by the Forest Stew-ardship Council.

The home’s exterior boasts metal siding and sustainable pine siding. Low volatile organic compound (VOC) paints, made from natural pigments and materials such as clay, coat the interior walls. The only new door in the house is a wide mahogany door shipped from Brazil, with a nature-inspired artistic glass window produced by local artist Chandler Tamelonis.

A GRAND STUDIO

Though he used to play all over the country, these days Bradbury only per-forms occasionally, in shows or at private parties in the Telluride area when friends such as actor/musician Bobby Carradine are in town. Today, recording is his main interest. His most recent release, “Restore Our World,” was produced on his private label with Skyblue, made up of friends who have performed with a who’s-who of best-selling recording artists, including John Denver, Prince, Otis Redding and George Benson.

“This is where it all happens. There’s no place like this anywhere in the region as far as sound quality,” Bradbury says of the studio that can accommodate a 60-person orchestra and “was designed by a rocket scientist to be acoustically perfect, then tweaked with six inches of organic cotton on the walls and sound columns.” High ceilings on the second level provide a surprising, well-designed indoor catwalk linking the dining and liv-ing areas to this space, which Bradbury has dubbed Studio in the Clouds (he

Alan Bradbury, with his favorite American Fender Stratocaster guitar.

Bradbury’s recording studio can accommodate a 60-person orchestra as easily as an intimate group of musical friends.