Two years ago, Bruce Redman Becker, founder/president of architecture and development firm Becker + Becker, purchased the historic building that served as the headquarters of the Pirelli Armstrong Rubber Company in New Haven, CT, to turn it into the Hotel Marcel, a Tapestry Collection Hotel by Hilton.
Built in 1970 by designer/architect Marcel Breuer, the LEED Platinum property will become the first net-zero hotel in the U.S. a year after opening this month. “We have to operate for a full year before we can demonstrate that we have done it,” said Becker.
Hotel Marcel will be the first net-zero and Passive House-certified hotel in the U.S.
The hotel’s owner noted that sustainability has been both a personal and professional interest, especially “in making buildings that don’t use fossil fuels.”
“As an owner, I just think energy efficiency is a good design,” said Becker. “It makes sense to design buildings that don’t use any more energy than they need to because the owners are always stuck with these utility bills. I wonder why has no one else done this because it seems like such a logical thing to do—design a building that doesn’t use any more energy than it has to, and then make the energy on-site so you don’t have to pay for it, and you can zero out your utility bill.”
The hotel uses solar panels on its roof and in the covered parking area to power the building. “We have enough panels to believe that we will not have any net electricity bill,” noted Becker. “We also don’t have a natural gas bill cause there’s no natural gas connection to the building.”
Other green energy initiatives include a Power-Over-Ethernet (PoE) lighting system and electric charging stations. “If you build an energy-efficient building, you can get some utility incentives, which we’ve qualified for,” said Becker. “And, for solar panels, there’s a federal tax credit for solar, which we’re able to benefit from, too.”
But, building an energy-efficient hotel does have its challenges. “Because we’re also taking advantage of the historic tax credits, we had to have our plans approved by the national park service and the state historic preservation agency,” said Becker. “They actually had a lot to say about our redevelopment plans.”
Becker pointed out the property, which will feature 165 guestrooms and nine historic suites, has also become the first hotel in the U.S. to earn Passive House certification because of the triple-glazed windows used in the building, as well as other insulation features.
“That’s a standard that goes beyond what the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program calls for,” he said. “The principle requirement is just to have a really well-insulated building envelope where there are no opportunities for thermal transfer or thermal bridging. So, where you have, say, a slab meeting an outside wall, you have to make sure that the edge of the slab is as well-insulated as the rest of the building. Where you have a window that’s inserted into a wall, you have to make sure there are no thermal gaps.”
For the PoE lighting system and motorized window treatments, Becker turned to Sinclair Digital, which pioneered the process at The Sinclair hotel in Fort Worth, TX.
“The thing that struck me about it is that you’re not having a transformer at every location of a light fixture; you have a whole DC system for your lighting and then you also can centrally control it,” he said. “It gives you the ability to remotely turn lights down or off if a room is vacant. You can also do this with the shades. We have blackout shades and sheer shades that are controlled, and we can drop them down if we want to reduce the thermal energy in the summer.”
According to Sinclair Digital COO Hannah Walker, her company came to the project after Becker reached out to its lightning supplier in his own search to incorporate PoE lighting in the Hotel Marcel.
“Our lighting supplier in turn recommended that Becker + Becker come to The Sinclair hotel to view our implementation and identify how the sustainable systems we used could be used at the Marcel,” she said. “After seeing the hotel in person, Sinclair Digital was hired to design the low-voltage [PoE] systems at the Hotel Marcel.”
Walker noted that besides the lighting and the window treatments, the Hotel Marcel used “standard low-voltage components such as data, IP phones, wireless access points, speakers and cameras. We are also using digital electricity as a low-voltage DC backbone as opposed to traditional AC power.”
The lighting at the hotel is powered using PoE lighting drivers, “which will, in turn, provide low-voltage 12-24V DC power to the LEDs directly,” Walker said. “This eliminates the AC to DC power loss at the light fixture and simultaneously allows for power and control over the same wiring infrastructure.”
For a historic project like the Hotel Marcel, using low-voltage infrastructure was actually an advantage because “it allows for smaller wiring and greater flexibility than traditional line-voltage AC power,” Walker said
