Heavenly Retreat is a unique, celestially-aligned, passive and active solar, green design/built home, located at 9,000’ elevation in the northern New Mexico Rockies.

The home is a tribute to its environment being embedded into the forest floor, and rising with four-terraced stories to a great room with a pyramid skylight apex and a geodesic dome garage. It currently has 6,784 square feet of luxury living space, with an additional 1,290 square feet that is ready to be finished out. It is designed to produce its own electricity (8kW) and active solar thermal heating for 11 zones of hydronic radiant floor heating. It includes three interior year-round producing greenhouses, and an organic outdoor summer garden.

Solar

Active Electric, Passive and Solar Thermal

Before the first ground was turned, we conducted a year-round study of where in the forest the site was most level, where the best views and sightlines were, where to place the footprint of the home to cut down the least number of trees, and where the Sun, Moon and stars provided the most solar exposure, moonlight and access to the dark night sky. This is where Heavenly Retreat now sits in its home in the forest.

The home is oriented exactly to the path of the Sun (pointing Solar South), which provides the most solar gain possible and takes advantage of the solar alignments throughout every room on the upper floors. Three active solar PV systems provide most of the home’s electricity year-round with two active solar trackers in the garden, and a fixed solar skylight running above the entire chef’s kitchen and attached greenhouse on the second floor. This provides huge amounts of ambient sunlight by day, and moonlight at night, while making enough electricity to power more than half the entire home.

There are 11 solar thermal heating panels on the roof above the atrium greenhouse that provide enough heat year-round to keep one of the two gas boilers from burning propane on all but the coldest winter nights. Under every floor surface and embedded in every soil bed throughout the home are 11 thermally-heated zones. 

These zones heat all of the living space in the entire structure – providing 180,000 BTU’s/hour for all three floor levels, three interior greenhouses, heated storage areas, the exterior studio flagstone patio, and the geodesic dome garage.

Magic Solar Alignments

Many of the rooms on the second and third floors have precisely aligned windows, corridors and hallways that are specifically designed to align the rays of the sun – at certain times of the day, and times of the year – to cast “sun shadows” onto the walls and floors, and aligning rays of sunlight with corresponding marker points on the walls.  

We call these features “magic solar alignments,” because when you see them in the house and understand what they reveal, they seem magical in many ways – they tell time throughout the day and mark the special cross-seasonal times of Spring and Fall Equinox, and Winter and Summer Solstice. Besides being special design features, the practical function is they maximize the amount of sunlight coming into the rooms, and maximize the solar collection on all the panels. This photo gallery shows sun ray alignments designed within the house. Click to see more.

Green Design/Build

I had studied both adobe and green architecture, astronomy and physics – and used all these disciplines to design this passive and active solar home, using high-performing, durable, traditional and eco-engineered building materials. The home is built to sustain all weather and last for at least a century. We used adobe, heavy beam, and recyclable product construction and insulation. Click the image to learn more.

The realtors’ listing shows the home as having 6,784 square feet. There are seven additional rooms/areas that are heated, plumbed, and functioning interior spaces totaling 1,290 square feet, which are not “officially counted” in the realtor’s assessment.

View Heavenly Retreat Floor Plans

Our Floor Plans PDF includes all four levels of the entire structure, which according to the detailed Matterport scan (+/- 1% accuracy) totals the Gross Internal Area (“heated, plumbed and enclosed interior space”) of 8,074 square feet.

Although the realtors’ website listing shows the home as having 6,784 square feet, in reality there are seven additional rooms/areas that are not “officially counted” because they are not totally finished yet. We have chosen to highlight these spaces on the floor plans, as 1,290 square feet Potential Space for the new owner to finish for their own purposes, style and function.

Ranking of Heavenly Retreat as a Green Home

With extensive professional career experience in solar and wind design, the homeowner completed both the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system’s checklist for the home, attaining “66” points and Gold Level. Also, the 259-page National Green Building Standard Rating Workbook was completed, scoring “789”, which far exceeds the highest minimum score of 611, therefore ranking Heavenly Retreat as attaining the Emerald standard.

Year-Round Greenhouses and Summer Gardens

Outside, to the south of the main entry, there are six terraced, organic growing beds in a 2,500 square foot completely walled garden – a 4-foot high, stuccoed wall and hand-forged gate follow the landscape and solar trackers, around to the lower casita entrance.  

Inside, there are three greenhouses – an atrium greenhouse with a large hot tub, that opens to a year-round sunspace with a tiled sitting patio and growing area. The larger, second floor, food-growing greenhouse sits conveniently adjacent to the large chef’s solar kitchen. All three greenhouse spaces are heated with their own climate-controlled, radiant floor heating zones. Click image to see more.