Natures’ Abode
Mark Tillack and Mother Earth coexist quite nicely on their little patch of Utopia.
On a wooded hillside in Northeast Ohio, Tillack has built a house that depends more on natural forces and his own labor than on the outside world. It’s powered by the sun, protected by the earth and devised to give back to nature in exchange for what it takes. Tillack created the design and did almost all the construction work on the environmentally sensitive house, which is essentially complete except for some landscaping and a few other details. It’s been a long process — so long, he joked, that the house is starting to need maintenance work even before it’s finished.
The house is a testament to self-sufficiency, a goal Tillack has pursued ever since he got the wacky idea as a teenager that he wanted to build everything in his life. He’d grown fond of the area when he used to camp in nearby Loudonville, so in 1994 he bought 18 acres in Richland Township.
It took him four years to find the land, then he had to save more money before he could start construction in September 1996. He laughed about how he naively thought he’d finish in four months, “and with my leftover money — that’s the funniest part — I’d go to Jamaica and lie on the beach and figure out my next move.”
Instead, the house has been an ongoing project, but one that has brought him enormous satisfaction.
Natural light
The 40-by-50-foot house faces south, so natural light washes the interior through windows in the front wall and through clerestory windows in a shed dormer. The abundant light reduces his need for electrical lighting and therefore cuts the amount of power he needs to draw from the industrial batteries that are charged by solar panels on his roof.
Tillack’s house isn’t connected to outside power lines, although he does have a propane-powered generator as a backup source of electricity. He’d like to add four solar panels to his existing 12, he said, since Northeast Ohio’s clouds make it necessary for him to store as much power as he can.
Earth is mounded against the rear of the house, a technique called earth berming. The soil helps moderate the indoor temperature and protects the house from winds that can carry off heated indoor air in winter and cooler air in summer, he explained.
The bermed earth, however, is sloped away from the house toward a swale he dug to carry off rainwater and melting snow. That helps keep the foundation dry — an important consideration in winter, because otherwise the water would extract heat from the house as it evaporates, he said.
Inside, the house has more environmentally friendly features. In the living and dining rooms — or, as Tillack calls them, the Dragonfly Room and the Rust Room, named for the way they’re decorated — the walls are covered in stone, which moderates the rooms’ temperature by holding warmth or coolness and releasing it slowly into the house. The living room flooring is made from bamboo, a fast-growing, renewable resource. The water heater is a tankless model that uses a propane flame to instantly heat only the water that’s needed.
The only heat source is a wood-burning stove in the dining room, but Tillack has discovered he needs to add a small furnace to heat the house when he’s away for a few days or more. Otherwise, the house gets so cold that it takes days to heat up again, he said.
Composting waste
Tillack’s environmental commitment also shows in the features he incorporated into the house to allow him to give back to the earth. A lidded plastic bin in a kitchen drawer holds food scraps, and it’s removable so the scraps can easily be dumped onto a compost pile. His composting toilet collects human waste for eventual return to the earth — urine as a plant fertilizer component, and the rest as composted manure to be buried in the ground.
Because the toilet isn’t connected to water drains, the house’s waste water is all “gray water” — water from such sources as sinks, the shower and the clothes washer. An outdoor tank collects Tillack’s gray water until air pressure forces the water into a trough, where it can reach the roots of plants. “Or in this case, weeds,” he admitted, although eventually he plans to plant food crops around the trough.
Tillack incorporated as much salvaged and found materials into the house as he could. He reused corrugated metal siding and metal roofing from a neighbor’s barn, refurbished a stainless-steel kitchen sink that had been tossed out in some weeds and made box beams out of attic floorboards that came from a nearby house. Many of the reuses are quite clever, such as the section of bowling alley that he fashioned into a bathroom vanity top and the old doors that were used to panel the base of a kitchen island, doorknobs still attached.
And all through the house there’s a sense of whimsy befitting its owner, who makes his living as a children’s entertainer and songwriter. Turtles, cattails and dragonflies are painted on the sills of windows that overlook Tillack’s two ponds. A pipe that crosses a hallway near the ceiling is disguised by a miniature bridge he built around it. The wall that separates the Southwestern-style master bedroom and bathroom looks like the facade of a mission church, complete with a lighted bell.
He didn’t mind when the contractor who poured his concrete walls broke the news that the frame for his bedroom window had slipped, and the window had turned out crooked. Somehow, it just seemed to fit.
“People who sorta know me said, ‘Mark, did you do that on purpose?’ “No,” he said with a grin, “I’m not that creative.”
Or so he says.