Swank Hybrid Ready Garage on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill

Queen Anne Hill in Seattle has for years have had an eclectic mix of environmental savvy residences. To tap into this marketplace award winning green builder Martha Rose, president of Martha Rose Construction, Inc. in Seattle, is building the detached garages of their new homes City Cabins to be electric-car ready.

The detached garages at City Cabins will have a private sky-bridge that connects the garages to the main structures. The urban setting is perfect for the vegetated roofs that will be installed; on top of the waterproof membrane will be drought tolerant locally grown sedums from Etera in Mount Vernon Washington.

The vegetated roofs have a multiplier effect beautiful to look at, help control water run-off, bird friendly, and help cut down on the urban heat island effect. Rose’s installed this system on their last project Fish Singer Place in Shoreline. “The key” mentions Rose are having a engineered structure that will support the live load, welded-seam membrane, a good mix of pumice to compost, erosion control matting, and of course the right selection of plantings.

The garages will be wired for electric charging stations and equipped with data lines for online monitoring. Having a house, or more specifically a garage, that is ready to take advantage of the emerging eclectic car market could be one of the many environmental forward features Rose has designed into her new homes that could help them gain a competitive market advantage.

On August 5, 2009, ECOtality was awarded a $99.8 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to embark on this Project. Named the EV Project was officially launched on October 1, 2009 and will continue approximately 36 months. ECOtality goal is to install approximately 14,000 chargers in 18 major cities and metropolitan areas located in six states and the District of Columbia: California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Texas, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C. The major goal is to monitor the first 8300 charging stations and take the lessons learned to help pave the streamlined deployment of the next 5,000,000 EVs.

The EV Project will qualify 8,300 LEAF and Volt customers for participation based upon home electrical power capabilities. Because a significant amount of vehicle charging will take place at EV driver residences, a portion of The EV Project funding supports home charging units, or more correctly called “Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment” (EVSE). Participants will receive the home EVSE and up to $1200 credit toward the installation in exchange for allowing the collection of vehicle and charge information at home and publicly available EVSE.

City Cabins on Queen Anne Hill will be completed in October of 2011 and are now available for pre-sale. For more information contact Adrian Willanger 206 909-7536.