A New Lease
What happens to all those old Volvos once Berkeley drivers are done with them? They’re transformed into building materials for this funky home crafted from old car parts and other recycled goods.
July/August 2002
By April Thompson
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The architects knocked out six walls and added nine windows to create a bright, open room that blurs the boundaries between dining, cooking, and lounging spaces.
Photos by Cesar Rubio
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The windshield from a 924 Porsche juts over the plate-glass storefront door, bouncing light onto the walkway. Volvo hatchbacks brace a stair railing. Red, yellow and green road signs tile a bathroom wall.
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The gas-guzzling automobile may not seem like a fitting theme for a home renovated by two Berkeley, California, eco-architects, but it makes sense if you know Cate Leger and Karl Wanaselja. Given the couple’s penchant for creative experimentation and commitment to ecological design, it’s no surprise they’d spend their weekends rescuing cars from the junkyard and recycling them into a fixer-upper project. “Karl always dreamed of creating a ‘crushed-car’ house,” says Cate.
Nearly four years ago, Cate, Karl and their yet-to-be-born daughter, Chloe, moved their home and business from a small redwood cottage in the Berkeley hills to a Victorian-era house and adjacent shop on Adeline, one of the city’s bustling commercial streets. They had a lot of work to do—the two-and-a-half-story home was “basically a wreck,” says Cate. From roof to foundation and wiring to plumbing, the building had barely been worked on since it was built in 1900. “But the place fit our budget, and it had a good mix of potential and charm,” she adds.
While tending to the house’s ailing structure, Cate and Karl took the opportunity to modernize its aesthetics, materials, and function. They jacked up the house and built a new commercial space below, replacing the brick foundation with reinforced concrete, adding 25 percent fly ash (waste from coal burning) to reduce the use of energy-intensive Portland cement. The result was a compound of two street-level commercial spaces (the annex and the bottom story) and two residential units (on the second and third stories).
The couple sold two units and kept two for their home and business. The annex, formerly an antique shop, is now home to the couple’s architecture and general contracting firm. Leger Wanaselja Architecture has designed, constructed, and remodeled about twenty-five projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, including a rammed-earth art studio. The couple’s own home and office exemplifies their design objective: to make architecture functional, beautiful, and ecological. “With this project, I would like people to really consider the impact of remodeling a house or building an addition—or even just buying cabinets or staining the floor,” says Karl. “It’s getting people to think about the big picture in every little thing they do.”
Karl spent many a Saturday with his toolbox at local car yards, combing through acres of junked cars for good finds.
Doing more with less
Remodeling provided the team with creative challenges and opportunities, particularly in trying to maximize the use of light, space, and energy. Double-pane windows and blown-in cellulose insulation made from old newspapers and phone books not only conserve energy but also block out street noise. “We barely turn the heat on in the winter—we get a lot of solar gain on the south, and the bottom unit has an insulated slab floor that helps keep heat in the building,” says Karl. “If we were designing this from scratch, we could have used a passive solar strategy with all daylighting, but you have less control over things like that with a remodel.”
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