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Business & Tech

Landscaper Builds Home With Recycled Materials

Neil Markey takes being green to a whole new level with his Stony Brook home.

Nowadays it's considered hip to be "green" – that is, environmentally conscious. Stony Brook resident Neil Markey, owner of Sitescapes Landscape Design, has been taking this trend to heart, creating his dream home almost entirely with recycled and reclaimed materials – much of which he picked up on the job.

But he's not just jumping on the green bandwagon with this endeavor; to him, using recycled materials not only helps both the environment and his wallet, but it's also a way to express his artistic side. The result is a work of beauty where his artistic talent and green sensibilities have permeated every piece of brick, rock, and mortar.

Markey's design philosophy is that form doesn't have to follow function; instead, the two can go hand-in-hand.

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"The way design works, in anything – landscape, theater, music, the arts – if it's done well, and it's beautiful to be in, look at, and it functions the way it should, you'll spend more time appreciating it, looking at it, and wanting to be in it," he said.

Markey's house was originally built in 1958 as an L-shaped ranch. He moved in during 1997 and, five years ago, began a process of transforming the house to his vision. The home has become a storybook Tudor whose design aesthetic harkens back to Victorian and Medieval times, with a serpentine stone wall that runs the length of the front of the house.

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After a bad experience with an outside contractor, Markey took over work on the house with his own crew. Using his degrees in ornamental horticulture and landscape architecture, he spearheaded the extensive alterations to the house himself, including making complex cardboard models of the finished product he envisioned.

Whenever he does rip-outs on landscape jobs, Markey saves materials for future use. His garden is lined with cobblestones from a customer's house. The front of his Tudor is lined with a mish-mash of leftover redstone, bluestone, and bricks. His balcony is made from an old fence. The roofing is old clapboard from the original house, flipped over, cut up, sanded, painted, and re-applied. Markey used stones excavated from his own property to help pave areas of his driveway. Even many of the trees and plants on his property were procured from previous clients.  

On the inside, leftover ipe wood is everywhere. All the doors are made from the framing of an old garage. The tiered barn-style doors in his hallway are fashioned from a 1950s Sears shed, some bedroom furniture is made out of oak logs, and the fireplace mantle is actually an old granite street curb.

"I took it home one day," Markey said. "I was waiting for the right moment to use it, and... there it is."

A second-floor deck was constructed out of pieces of other decks. The upstairs bathroom contained a stand-alone stone shower nook with a floor partially made from rocks brought home from the beach. A jungle gym for his children in the backyard was made of yet more discarded decking; this guy could build a spaceship out of old decks if he wanted to. Still to come is a new kitchen.

The result? Markey's home has won many honors, including a Gold Design Award from House magazine in its March/April 2009 issue.

While being deemed "green" is important to Markey, it's secondary to his design sensibility.

"The 'green' thing to me is really misunderstood," he said. "You get people using recycled lumber, but at the same time they're doctoring it up with all sorts of oil-based stuff and have a 20,000 square-foot house burning lots of oil. When you see what big industry is doing, our little houses being green are just a drop in the bucket. But, you have to start somewhere."

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