Carol Woods Continues to Set the Industry Standard for Innovation and Excellence,
with the Help of Green Globes™
When facility managers at the Carol Woods Retirement Community set out to devise a new, campus-wide development plan, the objective was to accommodate a growing population and staff. But the spirit of innovation runs deep at Carol Woods and they soon found themselves looking for a tool that could help plan enhancements to the resident and staff environments while significantly improving building sustainability.
Carol Woods was conceived in the 1970s by professors from the University of North Carolina who realized that there weren’t any retirement facilities within 75 miles of the Chapel Hill community they loved—and who had the determination to change that.
Today, the facility covers 120 acres and includes 131 apartments in three main buildings as well as 152 cottage apartments, 54 assisted living apartments and a 60-bed health center. The various specialized buildings also include (among others), an assembly hall, aquatic center, crafts building, library and daycare center.
Like Green Globes for New Construction, Green Globes for Continual Improvement of Existing Buildings is a web-based system that includes an assessment protocol, rating system and guide for integrating environmentally friendly design into commercial buildings. It allows users to assess, benchmark and improve building performance and can be used to confirm that design objectives have been met post-construction. It can also be used to manage and compare multiple buildings within a portfolio, and is useful for assessing and identifying opportunities for improvement in older buildings.
“Our initial focus was strictly on evaluation,” said Jim Call, Director of Project Development for Carol Woods. “But we found that Green Globes was much more comprehensive. It prompted us to think about what I’d consider the green building basics—such as energy efficiency, water, resources, and indoor air quality—as well as less obvious areas such as total environmental management including our goals for overall energy improvement. It also encouraged us to think more broadly about how the buildings function and interact with the environment.”
The Carol Woods team surveyed 10 buildings of various types and made numerous improvements, such as accelerated installation of LED exit lights and programmable public area thermostats, solar water heating for the planned pool addition, the inclusion of an overall energy consumption analysis, and lighting changes throughout.
“The only downside was that Green Globes doesn’t address some of the unique circumstances faced by senior living communities,” said Call. “But we’re working in collaboration with our design consultants, JSR Associates, to develop a list of proposed additions that could make the tool (or a version of the tool) more closely reflect these environments.”
