Thursday, April 24, 2008
Originally posted at OregonLive.com

Written by Ruth Mullen
The Oregonian Staff

Getting off fossil fuel
The founder of Environmental Business Supplies builds a solar home

From the time he was a child growing up in Switzerland, Markus Stoffel has dreamed of building his own home.

At 46, the founder and former owner of Environmental Building Supplies is putting the finishing touches on his 2,000-square-foot fantasy in Northeast Portland's Cully neighborhood. To conserve energy and resources, Stoffel deconstructed his previous home and built a dramatic and eco-friendly structure on top of the old foundation.

"It was a little bit frightening at first," admits the businessman-turned-builder. "I realized I had no idea what I was getting into."

Scary, yes. But exhilarating, too: He got to use all those cool Earth-friendly products that he and his wife, Abby Mages, sold to Portland's burgeoning green building community -- a market the prescient young couple tapped into when they launched the business back in 1993.

They sold EBS to Seattle-based Ecohaus two years ago, allowing Stoffel to turn his attention to their own home. Its best feature, no doubt, is the one-third-acre lot perfectly suited for harnessing the sun.

Stoffel opened up the home's southern wall for light and passive solar warmth, adding soaring 16-foot ceilings upstairs and clerestory windows to illuminate interior rooms.

He did the initial design himself using a detailed cardboard mock-up to track the movement of the sun, and he relied on help from knowledgeable friends, such as green builder Dave Heslam, architect Andre DeBar and designer Mark Stinnette.

"Building a house is a lot more achievable here than where I'm from," says Stoffel, who grew up as one of four children in a three-bedroom apartment near Zurich. "In Switzerland there's a broad middle class that lives in apartments.

The Swiss, as a rule, also consume a lot less fossil fuel than Americans, so it makes sense that energy efficiency has long been his bailiwick, and solar power his passion.

"My goal was to get off fossil fuel," says Stoffel, a board member of Solar Oregon. "The energy we are consuming will not be there 50 years from now."