Some people think that building a "green" house is simply a matter of slapping a couple of solar panels onto the roof, says New Paltz–based architect Matthew Bialecki (www.mbialeckiarch.com). While clean energy is important, he acknowledges, there is much more to sustainable architecture.

The extensive use of glass blurs the line between house and landscape.

"Sustainability for me is not only the technical aspects," he says. "It's also an aesthetic issue—does the building sustain the local attributes, the character, of the region?"

Perhaps nothing expresses Bialecki's architectural philosophy better than the 2,300-square-foot home he designed for Anne Allbright Smith and Raymond D. Smith, Jr., in Gardiner. The house is not only efficient to heat and cool and easy for its owners to maintain, it also seems a natural outgrowth of the boulder-strewn terrain at the foot of the Shawangunk Ridge.

The one-story house, which won a 2004 award for excellence in design from the American Institute of Architects, is crafted primarily of stone, wood, and glass, and blends into the landscape while framing a spectacular view of the mountains.

"Anne and Ray didn't want to live in a house that felt better in Santa Fe or in Montauk than it did in the Gunks," explains Bialecki. Indeed, it was the mountains that prompted the couple to move here, from Westchester, in April 2004. Says Anne, "We decided that it was kind of silly to be coming up here all the time to hike; we might as well live here."

Building materials play an important role in integrating this house into its surroundings. To echo the Shawangunks' distinctive conglomerate rock, Bialecki turned to David Kucera, Inc., a Gardiner firm that specializes in cast stone and reinforced concrete. Kucera's Gunk-Crete, a concrete and quartzite aggregate mix, was used to create the home's focal point, a fireplace that dominates the great room. The thick masonry walls help to stabilize indoor temperatures by storing and radiating heat. Gunk-Crete was also used for the chimney, which is an integral part of the building's façade. "We wanted to build the house out of something that evoked the rock," says Bialecki. "To be able to look at the cliffs and feel that there is a relationship there is really important."

View Finder The naturally bright, stone-filled great room.

The extensive use of glass also blurs the distinction between house and landscape. In the great room, a wall of windows overlooks a grassy field punctuated with rocks, with the Mohonk Mountain House's Skytop tower visible in the distance. To coax southern light into a home that faces north (toward the all-important view), Bialecki oriented the rooms so they would have multiple exposures. The windows let in so much light, say Anne and Ray, that they rarely need to turn on the lights during the daytime. To minimize heat loss and gain, Bialecki selected argon-filled windows with a Low-E (low-emittance) coating.

In the great room, cypress beams run across cypress ceilings and extend to the outdoors, where the exterior siding is also made of cypress. The warm, durable wood was also used for the built-in bookcases of Ray's study. Leafy trees, carefully preserved during the building process, shade the house, helping to keep it cool during the summer months.

For insulation, Bialecki wrapped the exterior walls in foam and left a ventilation gap between the insulation and the siding. This so-called "rain screen" allows moisture penetrating the walls to leak back out. "The house is sustainable in a healthy sense," explains Bialecki, "because it avoids mold and other trapped moisture inside the wall cavity." The same concept is used on top of the house, where a large venting area was placed between the insulation panels and the recycled-metal roof. The vents allow heat to dissipate outdoors, and a radiant barrier reflects the sun's heat away from the building. "Most roofs on a summer day can easily get to 170, 180 degrees," says Bialecki. "You want to cool that down in the evening and not have the proverbial frying pan sitting down on your head all night." Last summer, Anne and Ray say, they turned on the air conditioner only once or twice, and then only briefly.