As I turn onto a gravel driveway off Shaws Creek Road in Caledon, I can’t see over the hill in front of me; to my left there’s a murky marsh, to my right an open field bordered by a tall forest. When the car reaches the top of the hill, I am treated to a long, sunny view of Whole Village stretched over 191 acres.

Whole Village is a commune, though they call themselves a “sustainable farm community;” essentially, they are a group of like-minded people living together on an agricultural property, farming, working, gardening to try to reduce their ecological impact on the environment.

There’s no leader, members don’t extol any particular spiritual beliefs and, unless you count wearing homemade masks during bonding retreats, don’t practice any strange rituals.

The community was started 12 years ago by a group of parents with children at the Waldorf School in King Township; the group wanted to establish a sustainable community that would live off the land together in harmony with the natural environment.

The parents searched within King for a suitable property to live out their dream, but couldn’t find one.

A 191-acre farm in Caledon became available and, to some members of the group, it seemed the perfect location; a wetland on the front of the property, a large forested area, a Conservation easement and a man-made pond.

In early 2000, eight members decided to carry forward and purchase the Caledon property. The others dropped out or moved on to other things. The group rebuilt their membership and in July 2002, finalized the purchase of the property.

Jeff Gold, a slim, bearded man with intense eyes, was one of the original members.

“The founding principles and vision of Whole Village date from the work that original group did in 1996 to 1999,” Gold explained.

One of those principles includes fostering an atmosphere of mutual interdependence through shared facilities, resources, responsibilities and activities balanced with an appreciation of privacy and private ownership.

As my car rolls on to the property, to my right is the group’s crowning achievement, and a physical symbol of that principle; Greenhaven is a 15,000 square-foot yellow building that hugs the hillside. The one-storey building with several rounded, spaceship-like skylights covering the roof, took Whole Villagers five years to complete. To get the house built – and to be able to live together in one communal home – they had to fight a lengthy legal battle with the town and prove themselves to the surrounding community.

I pull into the gravel parking lot and get out of my car. Behind me is the farm’s original barn – a typical faded-grey structure; beside that, further into the property, I get a glimpse of the original red-brick farm house.

I walk toward the wooden peak that marks the entrance of Greenhaven. Inside, grey mats are stacked with footwear belonging to residents and visitors. Fifteen adults and three children live in this house.

Martha Saunders, a sturdy middle-aged woman with short grey hair and a friendly face, is one of the adults.

As Saunders opens a second glass door that leads to the building’s industrial-sized kitchen she asks: “Are you here for the orientation?”

I nod, and she leads me through the kitchen, where a few young people are preparing breakfast, filling the room with the aroma of coffee and toast.

Greenhaven is made up of private suites and common areas shared by everyone.

Shared spaces include the large, bright kitchen whose walls are covered with utilitarian open shelves filled with neatly stacked dishes and bulk foods.

Saunders guides me into the dining room, an informal open room framed with windows overlooking the forest; the tables form a square in the middle of the room; though the chairs are empty, I can imagine many animated group meals around the table. Whole Villagers eat together five nights a week, taking turns cooking and cleaning up.

Saunders shows me to a seat on a couch centred in front of a tall, stone masonry heater in the living room.

Whole Village hosts open house orientation tours once a month in an effort to help the community find out more about them and to attract new members.

Joining me on the tour are two young couples with kids who are interested in the community shared agriculture program (buying “shares” in the farm gets you a weekly basket of Whole Village grown produce from spring until late fall), a middle-aged couple who are interested in the building’s environmentally-friendly features and two seniors gathering information on the ins-and-outs of communal living.

Saunders, a retired religious studies professor, joined Whole Village five years ago.

“I have been deeply committed to living simply and sustainably for a long time,” she explained to me, later. She was also interested in “living in community” for a number of years but didn’t really pursue that interest until she met her partner, Mairy Beam.

“Mairy was in the process of becoming a member of Whole Village and I began to accompany her to meetings,” Saunders says.

Saunders recalls her first meeting with the group.

“…It was a very interesting experience as it was obvious that there was some conflict within the group.”

Conflict is common in any group – especially when you are facing an uphill battle, which Whole Village certainly was.

As Gold explains when the group first approached the town with their plans – which included creating an eco-village of 100 to 120 people – the town was very receptive.

In the fall of 2002, they hosted an open house for residents from the 30 households surrounding the farm, to introduce themselves and the concept.

“Some neighbours strongly objected to the entire idea,” Gold says, “and began lobbying the politicians to put a stop to it.”

The town shut the door on negotiations and rejected their initial building permit application in July 2003.

Richard Paterak, the area’s regional councillor, says the town rejected the permit because they didn’t agree that the building could be defined as single family residence.

“We lost that fight in provincial court,” Paterak explains.

By 2004, the group got their a building permit.

As Saunders describes the legal battle to the orientation group, she doesn’t seem bitter.

Though the fight was expensive, time-consuming and frustrating, Saunders says in retrospect, it may have helped the group band together.

“We’ve gotten better at resolving disputes,” she tells the group, laughing. “We stuck together through some pretty big obstacles. We try to remember that when we are trying to solve smaller problems around here. It keeps things in perspective.”

And she doesn’t seem to hold any grudges against the community that she now calls home.

“Part of the thing that attracted us to this area was the fact it is anti-development. We are a large group living on a small acreage. We had to prove to the town and the community that we were sincere in what we were trying to accomplish – live lives with as little impact on the environment as possible,” she says.

As Saunders takes the group through Greenhaven, it becomes clear that getting permission to build their dream home was only the first step in the struggle; as Whole Village initiated its plans for a ‘green home,’ they faced other challenges – and had to find compromises they could all live with.

One of Whole Village’s plans included a green roof. But Gold explains that the original contactor who applied the roof insulation and membrane didn’t do it correctly.

“A lot of his work had to be repaired or replaced,” Gold explains. “We wanted to make sure the roof was watertight before considering the additional $60,000 to $70,000 cost of installing a green roof. It is still something that may happen in the future…”
The group also wanted to install composting toilets in each suite and in the public washroom just off the main living room, however the town would not approve it saying Whole Village would have to get permission from the Ministry of Environment.

“We had waited so long to get into this place, we didn’t want to wait any longer,” Saunders explained. “We compromised and put in low-flow toilets instead.”

The group also tried hard to keep toxins out of the construction process. For example, the paint throughout the home is silicone-based with no toxins; as well, the bamboo flooring was chosen because it’s a renewable resource.

However, when member Maria Bardowski, who developed severe chemical sensitivities while working in the hospital system during the SARS epidemic, moved into the house, she found something irritating to her ailment.

Gold explains that Bardowski and her partner Jamie LaTrobe chose to install the bamboo flooring in their private suite. “There is enough off-gassing from either the flooring itself or the ‘green’ glue that was used to attach it to the concrete, to make it impossible for Maria to spend much time in the suite, especially in the winter,” he said, adding, “hopefully the off-gassing will diminish over time.”
“As we found, there is no perfect building material,” says Saunders, during her tour. “You can try hard, but we realized that sometimes you can’t have everything you planned.”

But something they did get right in building Greenhaven, Saunders says, was making sure everyone has a room of their own.

There are 11 private suites including several bachelors, one-bedrooms, two-bedrooms and one suite that accommodates a large family; each suite has a bedroom, kitchenette, a small living room and a bathroom. Saunders says when Greenhaven was being designed, each member decided how much private space they needed – and paid accordingly.

Saunders takes the tour group down a series of institutional feeling hallways leading to the suites. The flooring is cement and the walls are sporadically adorned with photos.

But when Saunders takes us into her suite – a bright two-bedroom apartment filled with fragrant plants – the atmosphere is homey and warm. On a soft blue couch, a black cat lounges in a sunbeam piercing through the patio doors.

“The nice thing about the design is when you feel like it, you can go someplace and shut the door,” Saunders says.

Saunders takes us through a few more suites – each decorated in its own style but all equally comfortable – before heading outside to show us the greenhouses and fields where several Whole Villagers are busy pulling weeds.

As we watch them work, a few Villlagers stand up smile and a wave to us.

“Living in community is not paradise,” Saunders says, slowly, cupping her hand over her eyes to keep off the sun, “but it works, most of the time, it works.”

Greenhaven Specs

From the early beginnings of the Whole Village project, the construction of earth-friendly and energy efficient housing was a centre part of the group’s collective vision.

The original design for the building was quite ambitious; in the end, not every element of the design program has been realized; however, the results are still impressive.

Greenhaven is a one-story structure with a shallow, insulated foundation instead of conventional footings, frost walls and no basement. The floor is an eight inch thick monolithic structural concrete slab, (as compared to four inches in a typical building). It sits on a pad of compacted fill, which was extracted from the extensive gravel and sand deposits on the Whole Village farm.

- First the formwork for the entire floor was built, and then plumbing drains and vents, electrical power distribution conduits and the exhaust system for the heat recovery ventilation system were all installed below grade. A layer of polyurethane insulation was then sprayed on the pad, three inches thick (R20) in the middle of the floor and six inches thick (R40) at the edges. An additional three inch of rigid foam insulation was applied to the outside edge of the floor. To complete the shallow insulated foundation, more rigid foam in the form of recycled refrigerator doors were installed.

- The extra thickness of the floor slab adds an enormous thermal mass to the inside of the building envelope. Thermal mass acts like a storage battery for heat: soaking up and storing excess heat during the day when the sun is shining and releasing it at night, evening out temperature fluctuations in the building. The floor is also structural, allowing load bearing walls to be put up anywhere on the slab with no need for additional footings. The hydronic, radiant heating system is also in the floor.

- Greenhaven’s walls and roof consist of structural insulated panels, which are a sandwich of oriented strand board and polystyrene insulation. Wall panels are four feet by nine feet and eight-and-a-quarter inches thick (R32), while the roof panels are four feet wide and anywhere from eight to 16 feet long (R39).

- Door and window frames are made from fiberglass and many of the windows and doors are triple glazed, and all have at least double-glazing, with a low_E coating and Argon gas between the panes. The triple glazed windows are rated R7.7.

- Three five-ton ground source heat pumps provide heat and hot water for the residents. As well, 6,800 feet of one inch polyethylene pipe has been laid in six foot deep trenches in the field next to the house. A working fluid composed of water and ethanol circulates in these loops. The heat pumps extract heat from the working fluid and transfer it to 17,000 feet of half inch pipe that has been placed in the floor slab. A heat pump can use one unit of electrical energy to move three or four units of heat energy. Electricity for the heat pumps, lights, motors, compressors and other devices in the building can be supplied by a combination of photovoltaic panels, a wind generator and the provincial electrical grid. (Whole Village purchased solar panels but had not installed them as of press time, as well plans for a wind turbine have been put on hold.) Solar hot water panels will provide hot water during the spring, summer and fall.

Written by Karen Martin-Robbins (Originally published in Sideroads of Caledon magazine)