Johnston Design Group talks us through building homes that maximize enjoyment and minimize impact.
With carbon emissions rising and new developments multiplying, Johnston Design Group works to replenish some of the environmental losses that come along with the building process. While each client is welcome to tackle their project in their own way, Johnston Design Group offers a variety of environmentally friendly solutions. Founder Scott Johnston discusses the company’s mission and how the end results might look for different clients.
Q. How would you describe Johnston Design Group and its mission?
A. Johnston Design Group is a collaboration of architects, planners, and interior designers that have the express purpose of advocating for a restorative built environment. Our work offers stakeholders a realistic, economically viable approach to environmental stewardship that is accessible to everyone in our community.
Q. What is restorative design?
A. The foundation for restorative design is to create a healthy home—one that has ample natural light, fresh air, and is free of harmful chemicals. [This] includes making a building healthy to live or work in, achieving economic resilience through conservation of resources, and connecting people to each other, their location, their home site, and the outdoors. Every time you build a home, you’re going to disrupt nature, but you also have the opportunity to repair nature in certain areas and create more biodiversity.
Q. What are the benefits of restorative design for homeowners?
A. While we are advocates of restorative design, we never tell a client how green their home should be. Instead, we review the costs and benefits of each design strategy and prioritize the elements that are uniquely important to each client. We begin [by designing] a home that naturally optimizes the best features of the home site. The next step is to implement the best fit for energy conservation for each homeowner and even include renewable energy as part of the solution. Then, we bring it all together by carefully integrating the home with the ecology of the home site.
Q. What aspects of a home negatively impact the environment?
A. All new construction negatively impacts the environment in some way. The goal is to honor the natural resources by limiting the negative impacts while at the same time offering restoration by enhancing the site with restorative landscape, reducing waste during construction for the life of the home, and strongly connecting the home occupants with the natural setting.
Q. What structures can you alter or change to avoid these effects, and what do you use as a replacement?
A. When you disrupt a site to build a home, there are opportunities to create more ecological value in different ways either through biodiversity or wildlife habitat creation. We [also] try to be thoughtful about the way we use resources. We try to use more local, highly durable resources so we don’t have to replace them as frequently. And, of course, the more we can be carbon neutral with our energy needs, the better we’re doing for the environment. We often use geothermal for heating and cooling, which is carbon neutral; we use solar photovoltaics for making electricity, which is also carbon neutral; and sometimes, we use solar thermal. So those are carbon neutral versus coal and natural gas that go into energy that’s off of our grid.
Q. How have Johnston Design Group’s projects impacted the environment so far?
A. Johnston Design Group’s first new building received a national award from the Environmental Protection Agency. Since that time, we have had the good fortune to design several zero-energy buildings and several LEED-certified buildings, including the first LEED Platinum-certified building in South Carolina. We have had the opportunity to restore compromised natural resources. Our recent work with the Newtown community is very exciting as we facilitate the restoration of an environmentally compromised neighborhood while we help to rebuild a vibrant, diverse, and resilient community.
Q. How did you come to create Johnston Design Group? What motivated you?
A. I began thinking about turning my focus toward restorative design as I was finishing the SC Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities back in 2000/2001. Brad Wyche, who founded Upstate Forever, was very encouraging to me from the very beginning. Other inspirations included Edward Abbey’s pithy quote that “there are no vacant lots in nature” and Iris DeMent’s call to action, “Living in the Wasteland of the Free.”
