Park life: The Presidio's Belles Townhomes

LivingHomes steps away from green prefab momentarily to unveil San Francisco's Belles Townhomes, the city's first LEED Platinum multifamily project. Added bonus: It's located in the middle of a National Park.

Wed, Oct 06 2010 at 2:06 PM EST

The Belles Townhomes in San Francisco's Presidio is the first LEED Platinum multifamily building project in that city.

Images: LivingHomes

The last I checked in with the Presidio, San Francisco’s sprawling, historic military base turned stunning National Park — complete with dense forests, beaches, restaurants, museums, an environmental learning center, and more — was last November when I featured ZETA Communities’ super-efficient Seed & Plant Lab at the Presidio Stewardship Center. As mentioned in that post, the Presidio is unique in that, unlike most large, urban parks, you can actually live (or work) there in both historic and non-historic residences scattered about 21 unique neighborhoods that give the park a self-contained city-within-a-city vibe.

Now, the residential scene within the Presidio has gotten a whole lot more green with the announcement that the Belles Townhomes, the park’s only new constructed residential building, has received LEED Platinum certification making it the first multifamily residential building project in San Francisco to receive that honor. The project is also GreenPoint Rated with a score of 158.

Designed by 2010 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award-winning Kieran Timberlake for green prefab powerhouse LivingHomes (it’s the firm’s ninth LEED Platinum project) and developed by Forest City in partnership with the Presidio Trust, the Belles Townhomes community consists of seven attached three-story townhouse rentals. Each of the 3-bedroom, 3-bath units are between 1,655 and 1,687 square-feet with ground-level patios and private roof decks that overlook a shared green and wooded area. Although not prefab, the structure was site-built to meet LivingHomes Z6 Environmental Goals: zero energy, zero water, zero indoor emissions, zero waste, zero carbon, and zero ignorance.

Z6 features at the Belles Townhomes include EnergyStar appliances, CFL lighting, high insulation, a rainwater harvesting system, rooftop photovoltaics, low-flow water fixtures, sustainable and recycled building materials, no- and low-VOC carpets, paints, and sealants, and advanced "dashboard" monitoring systems within each unit that allow residents to track utility usage in real-time.

Proclaims LivingHomes CEO Steve Glenn in an official release:

It is an honor for LivingHomes to be a part of a groundbreaking project like Belles Townhomes. The Presidio is an incredible wilderness in the middle of San Francisco, and it’s critical to build new buildings there in a way that minimizes the impact on natural resources. We hope Belles Townhomes set the bar for future projects there. It’s also our first foray into multifamily housing, which is arguably the most responsible kind of housing. We hope to make this a major focus for LivingHomes.

The Belles Townhomes — which, by the way, are adjacent to the massive Presidio Landmark adaptive re-use project in the south end of the park — will be available for leasing later this fall.

For more gorgeous, deep green LivingHomes projects, check out my posts on the LivingHome Newport Beach and the LivingHome Santa Monica House which has the honors of being the first LEED Platinum home in the U.S. Also, be sure to head on over to the LivingHomes blog to get the latest news of the firm’s next multifamily venture, a Ray Kappe-designed project in Los Altos, California.