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LEED award for Water Mill site
Photo credit: Handout
Entreprenuer and developer Ari Meisel, below left, turned his Water Mill commercial site into his playground for green building materials, and his fun snagged a gold LEED award.
For one thing, Meisel mixed into paint an additive that looks like sugar, microscopic spheres of ceramic that are supposed to reflect heat into the room during winter and out in the summer, lowering energy bills.
The floor-to-ceiling glass is special also, he said, because it has the “insulating value of a brick wall . . . and it filters the UV light so you have a better quality of light coming in.”
“In a very childish way, I find these products so cool,” said Meisel, 27, a Manhattanite whose family has a summer home in Sagaponack. “It’s like playing with Legos. They’re just really neat, gadgetry kind of things that can make a building so interesting.”
Developing the acre on Montauk Highway was a venture for family firm, Meisel Development, based in Manhattan.
Ari’s father Louis, a SoHo art gallery owner who coined the word “photorealism” 40 years ago in championing the art movement, calls himself the concept man and the owner of several commercial properties in the Hamptons. Ari’s uncle Elliott, a Manhattan attorney, handles the legal work.
Ari, the Ateliers’ project manager, was like an entrepreneurial wonder growing up. He was still in business school when he developed empty warehouses into a sort of upstate SoHo for Binghamton, just like his father helped create Manhattan’s SoHo into the artsy, upscale retail hub of today. The young Meisel said he embraced the LEED and green movement in a big way after the architect, James Merrell in Sag Harbor, suggested going for green certification.Now he’s a LEED certified professional, half the LEED Pro consultant team, and he has a book due out next year about green materials for each room of the house, along with the points each material can get toward LEED certification.
Both father and son said it wasn’t easy getting through the building process in Southampton Town.Some town specifications were less green than what the Meisels wanted, the two said. Even in the end, the father said, the certificate of occupancy was held up last week when an inspector that the dry well grates still had the plastic wrapping on.
But now, the family is taking in the green plaudits. “You notice right away that it’s very quiet and you can breathe very easy,” Ari Meisel said. “It just feels clean.”Handout Photos
Tags: green , Hamptons , Ari Meisel
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