Zavaleta's environmentally friendly new home wins award
It all started more than five years ago, when Tershy and his wife, Erika Zavaleta, were living in a different house on the Bethany Curve Greenbelt on the Westside. They knew they wanted to remodel their home, but they kept running into the same roadblock. “What we really wanted to do was turn our house, which was facing the street, around 180 degrees so it faced the park, but it seemed impossible,” explains Tershy. Luckily fate stepped in, and another lot on the park went up for sale. It was the opportunity to build the eco-friendly family home they’d always wanted, and they jumped on it.
Tershy and Zavaleta are both professors at UCSC: he of ecology and environmental biology, she of environmental studies. In 2008 they began consulting with Arkin Tilt Architects, a firm that specializes in energy- and resource-efficient design, about creating a low-energy family home oriented toward the park with a small footprint.